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Over the past 2 years, a team of researchers and research students led by Professor Soh Yeng Chai (School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering) and Dr Zhang Ying (SIMTech) have been toying with the use of optical fibers as photonics components for measurement and communication applications. One of the innovative products developed through the joint research collaboration is the all-fiber optical interleavers/de-interleavers. The technology enables the realization of low-insertion-loss optical filters that have good compatibility with optical-fiber-based communication systems and measurement systems, and are capable of delivering simultaneously multiple channels of passband transmissions with specified spectral responses. |
The EEE-SIMTech collaborative research project of Prof Soh Yeng Chai and Dr Zhang Ying has recently won an international award. One of their projects, Three-Port All-Fiber Optical Interleaver, won the First Prize as the Best Project in the Photonics Innovation Village competition in Photonics Europe 2004. The special event is organized by SPIE in conjunction with Photonics Europe and is held from 26 - 30 April 2004 in Strasbourg, France. A team of 8 distinguished individuals that include heads of research institutions, presidents of companies, professors and the chairman of French BMFC bank judges the competition. Dr Henri Rajbenbach of the European Commission presented the awards. The purpose of the Innovation Village is to support and publicize research teams from universities, non-profit institutions and research centres working on research, new applications or product development. The EEE-SIMTech team was one of 17 finalists from France, Germany, USA, Singapore, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Ireland and Finland.
The three-port all-fiber optical interleaver project is the work of Mr Wang Qijie, a PhD student of Prof Soh Yeng Chai and Dr Zhang Ying. The three-port all-fiber interleaver is designed through the system theoretic approach and is realized by cascading three 3 x 3 directional fiber couplers. An interleaver/de-interleaver works like an optical router that allows existing DWDM filters designed for operations with wide channel spacing to be extended to system designs with narrow channel spacing in the range of 50GHz or even less. Basically, interleavers/de-interleavers can be scaled to match whatever channel combination or routing that might be needed. The designed multi-port interleaver can efficiently increase the channel counts with fewer stages of interleavers and provide more flexibility for optical signal multiplexing. The all-fiber structure has an extremely low insertion loss. In addition to the novel structure, a systematic filter design approach has been developed to design the interleaver quantitatively with desirable specifications such as flat-top passband/stopband, and passband isolation.
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