Speaker: Dr. Andrew Ellis
Date/Time: Friday, March 15 / 9am
Location: NRC Montreal Road Campus
Parking: Free
Organizer: IEEE Photonics Society
Organizer e-mail: kexing.liu@ieee.org
Organized by: Ottawa Photonics Chapter

Abstract: With the remorseless growth in demand for telecommunication services, the capacity of optical fiber links first exceeded the capabilities of electronics, requiring the introduction of wavelength division multiplexing, and is now approaching a fundamental limit. This limit is due to a trade-off between the familiar Shannon limit at low signal powers, and nonlinear effects at high powers. Before considering the implications of the capacity crunch when demand finally hits this limit, this lecture will review the technological achievements which took the industry from its first commercial service with the Dorset (UK) police in 1975 through to the 10 Tbit/s systems of today.