UCSB Leads Industry, Academic Project to Advance Optical Networking

A team of researchers in industry and higher education, led by a group at UCSB, has been awarded major financial support by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Microsystems Technologies Office to develop new technologies to advance optical router capacity far beyond the current state of the art. The team has been awarded $6.3 million for the first phase of its research, with optional phases that raise the total to $15.8 million.

The team expects to demonstrate all-optical technologies and systems that route data packets, the currency of the Internet, with no optical-to-electrical conversion. The potential payoff of avoiding optical-to-electrical conversions is to greatly increase the data speed and significantly reduce power requirements over today's approaches.

The ultimate goal is to shrink the size of state-of-the-art routers that today occupy a full 7-foot equipment rack down to a single linecard. The anticipated breakthroughs from this collaboration are expected to open new possibilities for the distribution of rich data, voice, and video content at vastly greater speeds and using less power.

"Imagine a data stream greater than 10,000 feature-length films blasting through an optical router in one second," said Daniel Blumenthal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and leader of the campus research team, in explaining the team's goal. The research, he explained, will seek "to revolutionize optical integration density and develop new technologies to advance optical router capacity beyond 100 Terabits per second," or about 100 times the capacity of current state-of-the-art routers.

The team is known as LASOR, for Label Switched Optical Router, and is made up of researchers from several leading technology companies—Agility Communications, Calient Networks, Cisco Systems, Inc., JDS Uniphase—as well as Stanford University and UCSB. DARPA's Microsystems Technologies Office will support the team's work over four years.

Chancellor Henry T. Yang called the participation of prominent industry leaders in the project "very exciting for our university, where we have developed an exceptionally strong research program in optical communication and networking."

Added Matthew Tirrell, dean of the College of Engineering: "The LASOR project team brings excellent research leaders from UCSB's faculty together with leading industrial and academic partners to try to increase the state of the art in the routing of optical signals by two orders of magnitude."

For more information on the technology under development, see 93106's Nov. 3, 2003, story on integrated light circuits and go to <http://engineering.ucsb.edu/news/51>.