Photonic Systems Group

The Photonic Systems Group is part of the Tyndall National Institute, and is affiliated with the Department of Physics at University College Cork. The group was created in 2003 with Science Foundation Ireland support to investigate advanced photonic systems in collaboration with other research groups and industry. The core team, lead by Professor Paul Townsend, Professor Andrew Ellis and Dr Bob Manning, was previously based in industry (at the former Corning Research Centre and British Telecom Research Labs in the UK), with many years of experience in photonic systems R&D.

The major theme of the Photonics Systems research programme is to find new ways to integrate different photonic and electronic technologies to demonstrate greatly enhanced capabilities (e.g. higher speed, capacity, or scalability) of optical communications and other applications, with the primary aim of reducing the overall cost and energy consumption of future full-scale systems.

Some recent examples of the group’s work include: 
• Advanced fibre-to-the-home network
• High capacity coherent communication systems
• New technologies for beyond standard fibre capacity limits 
• High speed electronic solutions for extended reach transmission 
• Colourless metro switching nodes
• Ultrafast on-the-fly all optical packet processing
• High speed all-optical sampling for device characterisation
• Secure quantum key distribution networks
• Fibre-based bio-sensing