Smart Integration of Photonic Devices
The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is the cornerstone of tomorrow’s digital economy. It is already creating a digital revolution where interconnected consumer devices and sensors are enabling increased process and workflow automation as well as new services. But our current electronics infrastructure cannot support this massive network’s energy demands. Above all, our current approaches cannot efficiently satisfy its growing request for information processing and data transfer.
Dr. Roberto Morandotti, Canada Research Chair in Smart Photonics, is using optics and photonics—with an emphasis on quantum phenomena—to find new ways to support the development of a faster and more power-efficient IoT network (through things such as high-bandwidth and low-energy fibre telecommunications).
Morandotti and his research team are looking to on-chip (integrated) photonics as an ideal platform for next-generation “smart” devices and other practical implementations, since it is intrinsically power-efficient and scalable, with high-bandwidth. More importantly, photonics has the potential to solve problem-specific computations faster than electronics. In particular, by making use of classical and quantum optical properties—such as interference and entanglement—optical (quantum) processing can achieve unprecedented parallelism and information processing speed. These properties may offer solutions to today's challenges in manipulating big data.
Ultimately, Morandotti’s research will have applications in a wide range of fields related to telecommunications, computer technologies and sensing, and will help to put both Canada and Quebec on the map when it comes to research in this area.