Agilent and UC San Diego collaborate on chip-scale photonic systems test facility

Santa Clara, CA and San Diego, CA--Agilent Technologies and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have established a new chip-scale micro- and nanophotonic- systems testing facility on the UCSD campus. The new facility is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) project and is being set up in conjunction with the multi-university Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN) led by The University of Arizona.

The new Chip-Scale Photonic Testing Facility is housed in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) which is located on the UCSD campus. The facility will support testing and characterization of micro- and nano-scale ultrahigh-speed optical components and subsystems for numerous applications, including technology for future data centers and cloud computing.

"Accurate, high-speed measurements are essential to the investigation of novel designs and fabrication techniques for nanophotonic devices," said CIAN Deputy Director Yeshaiahu Fainman, a Cymer Professor of Advanced Optical Technologies in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. "This testing facility will hopefully lead to closer collaborations with our industry partners. Agilent Technologies has made it possible for us to build a facility with state-of-the-art test and measurement equipment that complement the technologies deployed in other UCSD and CIAN laboratories."

A complete suite of 40 Gigabits-per-second (Gbps) test equipment will permit component-level compliance testing and troubleshooting of devices intended for NSF's MRI Data Center Testbed, further enhancing the work of Calit2 and CIAN in these areas. In the next few years, CIAN participants at UCSD expect to upgrade the basic data rates of the Chip-Scale Photonic Testing Facility from 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps (and greater). The facility also will add system- and network-level analysis capabilities, including modulation and bit-error rate measurement.

"We are delighted to be associated with the CIAN research effort and to help establish the testbed facility at UCSD for CIAN," said Bill Wallace, Americas region director of university development, Agilent. "The research conducted by distinguished CIAN and UCSD faculty will enable new, affordable and flexible networks, with data service rates of 10 Gigabits-per-second. The research being conducted by CIAN is both interesting and transformational in nature."

--Posted by Gail Overton; [email protected]; www.laserfocusworld.com.