Two recent works conducted within the framework of the ERC grant of AIT photonics expert Bernhard Schrenk from the Center for Digital Safety & Security has received recognition through being ranked as top-scored paper at OFC 2022, which with more than 15,000 attendees and ~1,000 contributed papers is the world’s leading global conference and exhibition for optical telecommunications.
In a world’s first demonstration, the first of the top-scored works successfully proves the simultaneous reception and transmission of radio signals over a highly simplified photonic signal translator. The employed principle is conscious to precious spectrum in both the electrical and optical domains: it utilizes no more than a single radio carrier frequency and a single optical wavelength while it establishes a nearly error-free bidirectional relay of wireless signals for the purpose of antenna remoting – a notion that has been anchored as a cornerstone in 5G and Beyond-5G radio architectures.
The second top-ranked paper accomplishes neuromorphic signal processing employing a novel photonic receptor that can read frequency-modulated synapses at the dendritic arbor of an artificial optical neuron. The experimental demonstration, spearheaded by PhD student Margareta Stephanie, showed simultaneous operation at multiple colors featuring both, excitatory and inhibitory synapses. Artificial neural networks based on photonic technology is touted to be a game changer in the field of information processing and AI, by virtue of its information throughput, its low latency, and potential to realize energy-efficient computation. Also, Ms. Stephanie got awarded with the Corning Travel Grant to attend the OFC conference, congratulations!
Besides these two works, the AIT team will present two more oral papers in the fields of mm-wave communications, for which optical frequency translation has been integrated in simultaneous baseband / radio communications, and the agile photonic steering of antenna beams.