With a total of 13 presentations at the 2024 editions of the OFC and ECOC conferences, the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology was one of the most visible contributors to the world’s two top-tier conferences on optical telecommunication and datacom this year. The team around the AIT photonics and quantum experts Bernhard Schrenk and Hannes Hübel from the Center for Digital Safety & Security at AIT contributed a wide array of peer-reviewed papers that span over a diverse range of timely and relevant research topics, addressing optical networking, 6G, optical AI hardware, and quantum communications – and including two top-ranked papers.
The contributions included:
• Demonstration of miniaturized quantum key distribution (QKD) transmitters and receivers – including photonic BiCMOS and shortwave SiN integration platforms,
• optical neural network implementations including a novel non-linear thresholding method for AI applications, as well as photonic signal processing that outperforms traditional electronics-based processing with respect to energy efficiency and device footprint,
• reconfigurable detector-on-demand and optical frequency multiplication schemes that responds to the needs for flexible optical metro-access and 6G networks,
• novel spectral bands for QKD, demonstrating solar-blind free-space link operation during daytime and highly efficient shortwave QKD for intra-datacenter networks,
• a field-installed Fiber-to-the-Room network integrating a LiFi backhaul for optical wireless communication over legacy telecom fiber,
• a bandwidth-flexible multi-color visible-light wireless optical communication system that integrates user localization,
• alignment-tolerant “Fiber-in-the-Air” communication links featuring simplified Fiber-Wireless beamformer configurations as optical air interfaces and stable free-space coupling between two fiber ports over several months.
The quality of AIT’s scientific work is evidenced through two top-scored papers, which have been ranked within the top-10% of accepted papers.
Mariana Ferreira Ramos was awarded with the “Corning Women in Optical Communications Travel Grant”. Congratulations!
By addressing OFC and ECOC, AIT enjoys visibility at the premier conferences in the field. OFC is the world’s largest conference and hosts ~12,500 registered attendees from 74 countries and 630 exhibiting companies, with roughly 700 presentations demonstrating cutting-edge research on telecom/datacom systems, their network deployments and the enabling photonic component technology.