Overcoming Resolution and Bandwidth limIT in radio-frequency Signal digitisation (ORBITS)
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Abstract
Analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the essential links between physical world in which all signals are 'analogue' (e.g., electric current generated by a microphone or a picture captured by a mobile phone camera) and the digital world of '0s' and '1s', where we store, transmit and process signals and information. ADCs enable (digital) computers to process signals from the (analogue) physical world. This capability has revolutionised our entire society, making computers (desk-tops, lap-tops, or smartphones) ubiquitous. In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase of the amount of information that is generated, stored, transmitted, and processed, driven by increased demand of our society on data and information and newly emerging applications such as virtual and augmented reality. All this information needs to be processed by ADCs, which can address the abovementioned need only when performing with better accuracy, affordable power consumption, in real-time (with low latency), and for increasingly broader bandwidth (faster) signals. This is extremely challenging with currently-existing technologies and is being vigorously pursued by both academia and industry. Most of these approaches are based on strategies like the use of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), photonic time stretch, or time interleaving. Unfortunately, all of these approaches seem to have formidable challenges. A clearly realisable route to next-generation ADCs that could support information growth in the next decade and beyond is currently lacking.
ORBITS aims to provide a radically novel and future-growth-proof solution to ADCs using optical assisted means. Specifically, it will exploit unique features of recently-emerged optical and photonics technologies, including optical frequency combs, coherent optical processing, and precise optical phase control. Optics offers three orders of magnitude larger bandwidth than microwave electronics used for ADCs today and has the advantages of ultrafast (femtosecond level) responses. The optical frequency comb technologies, in conjunction with coherent optical processing and phase control, enables dividing signal with high accuracy in the optical domain, which overcomes the fundamental limits such as timing jitter (time uncertainty) in conventional approaches, opening up a scalable and integratable technology for large bandwidth high resolution ADCs.
For practical (low-cost when volume-manufactured, compact, and low-power-consuming) implementation, ORBITS will investigate optical and electronic integration, which permit to harness merits across different photonics integration platforms, through collaborations and open foundries. Besides next-generation ADCs, ORBITS will study applications in future-proof high capacity optical and wireless communications. It assembles complementary expertise from top research groups in Universities and companies, aiming for a wide academic impact and a straightforward knowledge transfer to industry.
ORBITS aims to provide a radically novel and future-growth-proof solution to ADCs using optical assisted means. Specifically, it will exploit unique features of recently-emerged optical and photonics technologies, including optical frequency combs, coherent optical processing, and precise optical phase control. Optics offers three orders of magnitude larger bandwidth than microwave electronics used for ADCs today and has the advantages of ultrafast (femtosecond level) responses. The optical frequency comb technologies, in conjunction with coherent optical processing and phase control, enables dividing signal with high accuracy in the optical domain, which overcomes the fundamental limits such as timing jitter (time uncertainty) in conventional approaches, opening up a scalable and integratable technology for large bandwidth high resolution ADCs.
For practical (low-cost when volume-manufactured, compact, and low-power-consuming) implementation, ORBITS will investigate optical and electronic integration, which permit to harness merits across different photonics integration platforms, through collaborations and open foundries. Besides next-generation ADCs, ORBITS will study applications in future-proof high capacity optical and wireless communications. It assembles complementary expertise from top research groups in Universities and companies, aiming for a wide academic impact and a straightforward knowledge transfer to industry.
Organisations
- University College London (Lead Research Organisation)
- Fraunhofer Society (Collaboration)
- University of Bern (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON (Collaboration)
- Sun Yat-sen University (Project Partner)
- Socionext Europe GmbH (Project Partner)
- Microsoft Research (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
- Nokia (Ireland) (Project Partner)
- Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging (Project Partner)
- Aston University (Project Partner)
- University of Southampton (Project Partner)
- Hewlett-Packard (United Kingdom) (Project Partner)
Publications
Cai Y
(2023)
On the design of low phase noise and flat spectrum optical parametric frequency comb
in APL Photonics
Clark K
(2022)
Modeling the Performance of the Clock Phase Caching Approach to Clock and Data Recovery
in Journal of Lightwave Technology
Clark K
(2023)
Clock synchronizing radio access networks to picosecond precision using optical clock distribution and clock phase caching
in Journal of Optical Communications and Networking
Clark K.A.
(2019)
Low thermal sensitivity hollow core fibre for optically-switched data centre applications
in IET Conference Publications
Deakin C
(2024)
Energy Efficiency Bounds for Photonic Analog to Digital Converters
in Journal of Lightwave Technology
Deakin C
(2021)
Phase noise of electro-optic dual frequency combs.
in Optics letters
Description | Consultancy for UK defence solution centre |
Geographic Reach | National |
Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
Description | Bridging Optoelectronics and Nonlinear fibre physics to Develop a new frequency comb tool for eye imagING |
Amount | £15,250 (GBP) |
Funding ID | BB/X005100/1 |
Organisation | Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 08/2022 |
End | 09/2023 |
Description | Development of a pre-commercialisation frequency comb prototype for cloud data centre networks and metro telecom systems |
Amount | £87,321 (GBP) |
Funding ID | D2U 2020-22 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 03/2021 |
End | 03/2022 |
Title | Communications with Guaranteed Low Latency and Bandwidth using Frequency Referenced Multiplexing |
Description | This is the dataset for Communications with Guaranteed Low Latency and Bandwidth using Frequency Referenced Multiplexing |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Communications_with_Guaranteed_Low_Latency_and_Bandwidth_usin... |
Title | Data for "All-fibre heterogenously-integrated frequency comb generation using silicon core fibre" |
Description | Experimental data used in published version of [Sohanpal, R., Ren, H., Shen, L. et al. All-fibre heterogeneously-integrated frequency comb generation using silicon core fibre. Nat Commun 13, 3992 (2022)]. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Data_for_All-fibre_heterogenously-integrated_frequency_comb_g... |
Title | Data supporting the paper "Modeling performance of the clock phase caching approach to clock and data recovery" |
Description | This data was used to plot the figures in the final accepted version of "Modeling performance of the clock phase caching approach to clock and data recovery" hosted on UCL Discovery. The full published version of this paper may be found in the Journal of Lightwave Technology at 10.1109/jlt.2021.3130955. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2022 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Modeling_The_Performance_of_the_Clock_Phase_Caching_Approach_... |
Title | Low-latency Wavelength-switched Clock-synchronized Data Centre Interconnects enabled by Hollow Core Nested Antiresonant Nodeless Fiber |
Description | The uploaded file is the dataset for our manuscirpt named: "Low-latency Wavelength-switched Clock-synchronized Data Centre Interconnects enabled by Hollow Core Nested Antiresonant Nodeless Fiber", which is submitted and under review. The data is generated through rigorous optical data transmission and optical component characterization experiment. The experimental set-up was built and tested in 2022. MATLAB is used to further process the captured data. The data uploaded is used to plot figures in the submitted manusciprt. |
Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
Year Produced | 2023 |
Provided To Others? | Yes |
URL | https://rdr.ucl.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Low-latency_Wavelength-switched_Clock-synchronized_Data_Centr... |
Description | ACTPHAST4R: Collaboration with Fraunhofer HHI on PIC based coherent transmitter development |
Organisation | Fraunhofer Society |
Department | Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute |
Country | Germany |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | We design the photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and will test the performance of the PIC. |
Collaborator Contribution | Fraunhofer HHI offered us MPW and packaging service for the development of InP based coherent super-channel transmitter for high-resolution signal generation and detection. |
Impact | The device is still being manufactured. Further report will be updated. |
Start Year | 2022 |
Description | Collaboration with University of Bern on coherent supercontinuum comb generation |
Organisation | University of Bern |
Department | Institute of Applied Physics |
Country | Switzerland |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | In collaboration with researchers at the University of Bern, we develop fibre systems to significantly increase our frequency comb bandwidth from 10 nm to more than 100nm while still keeping low phase and intensity noise. The work leads to a travel grant funded by BBSRC for workshop, joint experiments and strategic partnerships. |
Collaborator Contribution | Dr Heidt at the University of Bern developed a simulation framework using our frequency comb signal and supported the development of the fibre system for frequency comb expansion with high coherence. |
Impact | Publications Benefits of cascaded nonlinear dynamics in hybrid fibers for low-noise supercontinuum generation, Optics Express, DOI: 10.48350/178809 Sohanpal, R., Ren, H., Shen, L. et al. All-fibre heterogeneously-integrated frequency comb generation using silicon core fibre. Nat Commun 13, 3992 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31637-1 |
Start Year | 2021 |
Description | Hollow core fibre assisted ultra-low latency data interconnection |
Organisation | University of Southampton |
Department | Optoelectronics Research Centre |
Country | United Kingdom |
Sector | Academic/University |
PI Contribution | This collaboration investigates the use of hollow-core fibre in data centre interconnects in conjunction with analog signal processing technologies developed within this award. UCL researchers use the hollow core fibre in the data centre system prototype with the frequency comb developed within this award, achieving a record low latency, optically switched system. |
Collaborator Contribution | ORC contributed hollow core fibre technologies, including 5km of HCF spliced to standard single mode fibre. |
Impact | This collaboration has led to three publications, including one top-scored paper and an invited journal publication, in leading international conferences and top journals in the field of optical communications. |
Start Year | 2020 |
Title | OPTICAL FREQUENCY COMB GENERATION APPARATUS AND METHOD |
Description | Frequency combs have found applications in numerous fields, for example, metrology, spectroscopy, microwave electronics, sensing, medical imaging, instrumentation, wireless and optical communications. For example, in the field of optical communications, significant cost and energy savings can be made by replacing a bank of N lasers (for example N=64, but N can be several hundred) with a single frequency comb. The coherent nature of the comb lines (phase of comb tones are correlated) as well as the equal frequency spacing of the comb tones, offers the prospect of ultra-high spectral efficiency (thus high capacity, fast networks), and the generation of electronic radio-frequency carriers with high purity, for linking optical systems to wireless systems. In many applications, the comb source needs to have sufficiently high optical power, low noise, and flat spectrum (i.e. similar power for all the tones) to enable these benefits to be achieved. There is a problem with generating a frequency comb with these properties, such as a large number of tones, each with adequate and similar optical power, over a relatively wide band of frequencies. It can also be a problem to generate a comb that is tunable in wavelength, bandwidth, and tone spacing. The present invention has been devised in view of the above problems. |
IP Reference | 2212004.2 |
Protection | Patent / Patent application |
Year Protection Granted | |
Licensed | No |
Impact | No commercial impact yet. However, as a new tool it has potential impact in metrology, spectroscopy, sensing and microwave applications, |
Description | Initiate new collaboration with Verizon Ltd. |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
Results and Impact | Initiate a new collaboration discussion with Verizon |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
Description | Invited presentaiont at IEEE summer topical 2023 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Invited talk on the application of ultra stable laser, with a focus on the impact of phase noise on photonic-assisted digitization. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
URL | https://www.ieee-sum.org/ |
Description | Invited talk in Advanced Photonics Congress 2020 |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Other audiences |
Results and Impact | about 40 international colleagues attend the PI's invited talk in the OSA advanced photonics congress, where the PI reported the latest resulted published by his group, sparking scientific discussion for future research direction and commercialisation opportunities. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
Description | Invited talk in IEEE Summer Topicals |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | more than 30 professionals attended this online international conference |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
Description | Invited talk in IEEE photonics conference (PIC2021) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | 30 professionals and postgraduate students attended the talk |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |