Photonic systems and technology

Welcome to EE-440, Photonic Systems and Technology. 

This course is a master level introduction course to optical communications. Overall this course is intended to present the operation principles of contemporary optical communication systems employing optical fibers and modern optoelectronic devices.

The class consists of 2 hours lectures. Computer labs, using a professional software, and exercises will complete the class. After each computer labs you will have to hand in a report. The reports will be graded and count towards the final grade such that your presence is strongly encouraged.

All informations will be posted on this moodle. The necessary documents for the computer labs will also be posted before class. Make sure to visit the Moodle each week to ensure that you have all the documents with you during class. Finally, all the material that you need to know will be in the lecture notes. However the books that are useful as a complement to the lectures, and which are available online from the EPFL library,  are:

B. Saleh, M. Teich “Fundamentals of Photonics”, Wiley (2007)

G. Agrawal “Fiber-optic Communication Systems”, Wiley (2021)

For this first week we will have a 2 hour lecture from 14h15 to 16h in DIA 004 followed by an introductory Computer Lab in CM1 103

Topics of the week:

• Introduction to the concept  of optical communication.
  
• Some basic communication concepts (for most this will be a review)
• Components of a photonic communication link
• Some fundamentals to start on light sources
  

Topics of the week: Photonic sources

• Basic light-matter interactions
  
• The P-N junction and light emitting diodes
• Semiconductor lasers
  

Note 1: There are quite a few types of sources and lasers out there and no time, unfortunately, in one lecture to describe them all ! We will therefore only cover two of the most used in optical communication.

Topic of the week: Modulation of light

• General modulation concepts
• Electro-optic modulators
• Electro-absorption modulators
• Advanced modulation formats

NOTE: the planning of the semester has been updated and this week, there is a computer lab

Topic of the week: light propagation 1- the optical fiber

• Review of the optical fiber
• Fiber losses
• Phenomenological description of dispersion

Topic of the week: light propagation 1- the optical fiber

• Review of the optical fiber
• Fiber losses
• Phenomenological description of dispersion
• Polarization mode dispersion

Topic of the week: light propagation

• Nonlinear Schroedinger equation
• Pulse evolution in a dispersive, nonlinear, lossy medium
• Dispersion compensation

This week: lecture using videos, no computer lab or exercises

Topic of the week: detection part 1 - photodetectors

• Photodiode basics
  
• Photodiode bandwidth

Topic of the week: detection part 2 - receiver and noise

• Components of a receiver
• Shot noise and thermal noise
• Signal to noise ratio

Topic of the week: optical amplification part 1

• Basics
• Amplifier properties
  
• Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA)

Topic of the week: BER

• Receiver sensitivity
• Bit error rate
• Power penalty

• Intro to light amplification
• Amplifier properties
• Optical pumping schemes

THIS WEEK: Start with the computer labs from 14h15 - 16h followed by the lecture

*** Announcement for Computer Lab-7 ***

Report submission: due May 27th 23:59. VPI software is available until May 24th.  

This is the last lecture where we will cover how, put together, we can make designs rules for overall systems.

This week is the last lecture. To wrap up we will finish on some if the trends in today's network and research in fiber optics.

You can also submit your report for the project until June 5th.