Aston joins the European Mode-Gap telecommunications project

Birmingham, England--Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AIPT; part of Aston University) has joined the European Union Mode-Gap project, which is looking to develop new optical-communications technologies and concepts to prevent a capacity crunch in the global-communications infrastructure.

The existing members of Mode-Gap are all well-known to Laser Focus World readers, and include the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC; Southampton, England), OFS Fitel Denmark (Brondby, Denmark), Phoenix Photonics (Surrey, England), Eblana Photonics (Dublin, Ireland), ESPCI ParisTech (Paris, France), Tyndall National Institute (University College Cork; Cork, Ireland), the Eindhoven University of Technology (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), and Nokia Siemens Networks (Espoo, Finland). (Okay, that was a lot of links.)

The AIPT's specialty is research in the field of fiber optics, high-speed optical communications, and nonlinear photonic technologies. Its 50-strong team of researchers will help Mode-Gap work towards developing a new network with at least 100 times the capacity of today’s systems. Professor Andrew Ellis of Aston University will lead the AIPT’s involvement in Mode-Gap.

The project's mission is to develop transmission technologies based on specialist long-haul transmission fibers, along with associated technologies that include novel rare-earth doped optical amplifiers, transmitter and receiver components, and data processing techniques to increase the capacity of broadband networks.

“AIPT has one of the strongest theoretical and computer-modeling activities in advanced optical-communications techniques in the world," says Ellis. "Aston will be able to accurately estimate the likely performance advantages of the various strategies within Mode-Gap, which is essential to establish that a significant net benefit over conventional systems may be achieved.”