Director Ron Hui working in a lab

Center for Communications, Networking and Photonics

About the Director

CCNP conducts both theoretical and experimental research in telecommunication systems, data and information processing and transfer, and networked systems which construct the backbone to support modern information society. In addition, research in fundamental photonic materials and devices not only support advances in telecommunication technology as building blocks, but also enables various interdisciplinary applications in bioimaging, spectroscopy, and remote sensing. Current topics of investigation include fiber-optic and wireless communications, digital signal processing, spectral-efficient modulation, communication network architectures and traffic modeling, LIDAR systems, semiconductor lasers, femtosecond fiber lasers, nonlinear optics, nonlinear microscopy and spectroscopy, and metamaterials. CCNP has prepared its graduate students for their career advances in national labs (such as Argonne National lab), telecommunication industry (such as Apple, Facebook, Qualcomm, Lumentum, Tyco submarine systems, ASML), and academia (Univ. of Washington).

CCNP Resources

100GS/s real-time digital scope, 25GS/s 2-channel digital arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), Vortex-7 X690T FPGA on Hitechglobal evaluation board with 2GS/s ADC and DAC, Xilinx Zynq Ultra-Scale-ZCU111 FPGA board integrated with 6GS/s ADC and DAC, a number of telescopes for free-space optical communication and lidar, a 50GHz RF spectrum analyzer (Agilent), RF amplifiers with bandwidths ranging from 10GHz to 40GHz,  a 600Gb/s dual-polarization coherent transceiver (Ciena Wavelogic-Ai) with specially engineered flexible digital interface allowing arbitrary waveform generation, detection and digitizing with 32GHz analog bandwidth, several femtosecond fiber lasers (100fs pulse width), a 12Gb/s bit error-rate test set, a 40Gb/s bit error-rate test set, two optical spectrum analyzers, an optical time-domain reflectormeter, 3 Agilent tunable semiconductor lasers, a NP-Photonics ultra-narrow-linewidth (<1kHz) laser, 3 Neophotonic narrow linewidth (<100kHz) tunable lasers, a 40GHz sampling oscilloscope (HP), tunable bandpass optical filters of various bandwidths, high-speed electro-optic I/Q modulators with 10GHz, 20GHz and 40GHz bandwidths, high speed photodetectors (32GHz - 40GHz), a number of commercial erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), an optical autocorrelator, Grenouille 15-100-225-USB "Frog" for femtosecond pulse characterization, several 10Gb/s commercial coherent transceivers from Ciena with digital interfaces modified for research purposes, a 16-channel OC192 commercial WDM system,  >1000km optical fibers of different types. A CW laser at 532nm (Coherent genesis) with 1W of power, a CW Ti:Sapphire laser (M squared SolTis) tunable from 400-500nm and 700 to 1050nm, a Femto-second laser at 1070nm (Coherent Fidelity), a tunable high peak power femtosecond Ti:Sapphire Laser (Coherent Chameleon Vision-S) with dispersion pre-compensation, a spatial light modulator (Holoeye model pluto), 2-channel acousto-optic scanner/deflector (Brimrose).