Fotônica para comunicações ópticas

Resumo

A proposal is presented for the creation of a National Institute for research, education, and knowledge transfer to the society and industry, focusing in the field of Photonics for Optical Communications. The Institute will be hosted at the University of Campinas - UNICAMP. Campinas is an industrial and R&D hub in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In this environment, UNICAMP developed a long tradition of high quality research in Optical Communications. The Institute will congregate researchers from the Physics Institute, the Electrical and Computing Engineering Faculty, and the Computing Institute at UNICAMP, as well as associated groups from CPqD Foundation (Campinas), Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas, Presbyterian Mackenzie University (Sao Paulo), Institute of Advanced Studies (São José dos Campos, SP), University of the ABC (Santo André, SP), Technological University of Paraná, Federal University of Pará (Belém), Federal University of Ceará (Fortaleza), Federal University of Espirito Santo, Federal Center for Education and Technology of Bahia, and Federal University of Alagoas. The research activities include fundamental studies in photonics, materials science, devices and system applications, as well as applied projects on demand from industry. Ongoing studies include: microstructured optical fibers, microcavity semiconductor lasers, fiber optic communication systems, nonlinear optics in fibers and waveguides, and modeling and fabrication of photonic structures and waveguides. The proponent team developed excellent research facilities in several fields of optics and photonics at UNICAMP. The facilities that will be available for the institute include modern laboratories for micro/nano photonics semiconductor devices fabrication, optical fiber fabrication and characterizations, nonlinear fiber optics, high capacity DWDM systems, device modeling, and an optical testbed (KyaTera). KyaTera testbed interconnects most R&D groups in optical communications in the State of Sao Paulo with multiple fibers arriving directly to the wall of the laboratories. The Institute will comprise 36 professors, 13 post-docs, 47 PhD students, 54 MSc students and 24 undergraduated students. In the last five years, these researchers generated more than 300 papers in international journals. The main mission of the proposed Institute is to establish a long term Program to foster the national development of Optical Communications through improvements in the research and higher education systems, transfer of knowledge to the society, and industry-academy interactions. The grand scientific challenges that motivate the proposed Program arise mainly from the foreseen explosive growth of the Internet, high definition video, broadband and mobile services, real-time applications, and user generated content. In order to cope with the expected demand for bandwidth and applications requiring low network latency and quality of service, the present transmission and networking capacities should increase by two-to-three orders of magnitude in the next 20 years. This is a conservative prediction when compared to the actual evolution of optical communications in the past 3 decades, where the capacity was increased by 6 orders of magnitude - from few Mb/s to few Tb/s. Even a 100-fold increase in capacity requires disruptive technologies, since the technology of present communication systems does not scale by such factor (see scalability challenge below). This imposes great challenges for the research community... (AU)