This proposal seeks funding to create a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems (CEPS). Photonics has moved from a niche industry to being embedded in the majority of deployed systems, ranging from sensing, biophotonics and advanced manufacturing, through communications from the chip-to-chip to transcontinental scale, to display technologies, bringing higher resolution, lower power operation and enabling new ways of human-machine interaction. These advances have set the scene for a major change in commercialisation activity where electronics photonics and wireless converge in a wide range of information, sensing, communications, manufacturing and personal healthcare systems. Currently manufactured systems are realised by combining separately developed photonics, electronic and wireless components. This approach is labour intensive and requires many electrical interconnects as well as optical alignment on the micron scale. Devices are optimised separately and then brought together to meet systems specifications. Such an approach, although it has delivered remarkable results, not least the communications systems upon which the internet depends, limits the benefits that could come from systems-led design and the development of technologies for seamless integration of electronic photonics and wireless systems. To realise such connected systems requires researchers who have not only deep understanding of their specialist area, but also an excellent understanding across the fields of electronic photonics and wireless hardware and software. This proposal seeks to meet this important need, building upon the uniqueness and extent of the UCL and Cambridge research, where research activities are already focussing on higher levels of electronic, photonic and wireless integration; the convergence of wireless and optical communication systems; combined quantum and classical communication systems; the application of THz and optical low-latency connections in data centres; techniques for the low-cost roll-out of optical fibre to replace the copper network; the substitution of many conventional lighting products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Many of these activities will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the proposed CDT includes experts in electronic circuits, wireless systems and software. By drawing these complementary activities together, and building upon initial work towards this goal carried out within our previously funded CDT in Integrated Photonic and Electronic Systems, it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required technical expertise, responsible innovation (RI), commercial and business skills to enable the £90 billion annual turnover UK electronics and photonics industry to create the closely integrated systems of the future. The CEPS CDT will provide a wide range of methods for learning for research students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to conventional lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, reading clubs, roadmapping activities, responsible innovation (RI) studies, secondments to companies and other research laboratories and business planning courses. Connecting electronic and photonic systems is likely to expand the range of applications into which these technologies are deployed in other key sectors of the economy, such as industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, data processing, defence, energy, engineering, security and medicine. As a result, a key feature of the CDT will be a developed awareness in its student cohorts of the breadth of opportunity available and the confidence that they can make strong impact thereon.

Energy efficient processes are increasingly key priorities for ICT companies with attention being paid to both ecological and economic drivers. Although in some cases the use of ICT can be beneficial to the environment (for example by reducing journeys and introducing more efficient business processes), countries are becoming increasingly aware of the very large growth in energy consumption of telecommunications companies. For instance in 2007 BT consumed 0.7% of the UK's total electricity usage. In particular, the predicted future growth in the number of connected devices, and the internet bandwidth of an order of magnitude or two is not practical if it leads to a corresponding growth in energy consumption. Regulations may therefore come soon, particularly if Governments mandate moves towards carbon neutrality. Therefore the applicants believe that this proposal is of great importance in seeking to establish the current limits on ICT performance due to known environmental concerns and then develop new ICT techniques to provide enhanced performance. In particular they believe that substantial advances can be achieved through the innovative use of renewable sources and the development of new architectures, protocols, and algorithms operating on hardware which will itself allows significant reductions in energy consumption. This will represent a significant departure from accepted practices where ICT services are provided to meet the growing demand, without any regard for the energy consequences of relative location of supply and demand. In this project therefore, we propose innovatively to consider optimised dynamic placement of ICT services, taking account of varying energy costs at producer and consumer. Energy consumption in networks today is typically highly confined in switching and routing centres. Therefore in the project we will consider block transmission of data between centres chosen for optimum renewable energy supply as power transmission losses will often make the shipping of power to cities (data centres/switching nodes in cities) unattractive. Variable renewable sources such as solar and wind pose fresh challenges in ICT installations and network design, and hence this project will also look at innovative methods of flexible power consumption of block data routers to address this effect. We tackle the challenge along three axes: (i) We seek to design a new generation of ICT infrastructure architectures by addressing the optimisation problem of placing compute and communication resources between the producer and consumer, with the (time-varying) constraint of minimising energy costs. Here the architectures will leverage the new hardware becoming available to allow low energy operation. (ii) We seek to design new protocols and algorithms to enable communications systems to adapt their speed and power consumption according to both the user demand and energy availability. (iii) We build on recent advances in hardware which allow the block routing of data at greatly reduced energy levels over electronic techniques and determine hardware configurations (using on chip monitoring for the first time) to support these dynamic energy and communications needs. Here new network components will be developed, leveraging for example recent significant advances made on developing lower power routing hardware with routing power levels of approximately 1 mW/Gb/s for ns block switching times. In order to ensure success, different companies will engage their expertise: BT, Ericsson, Telecom New Zealand, Cisco and BBC will play a key role in supporting the development of the network architectures, provide experimental support and traffic traces, and aid standards development. Solarflare, Broadcom, Cisco and the BBC will support our protocol and intelligent traffic solutions. Avago, Broadcom and Oclaro will play a key role in the hardware development.

In this proposal we aim to develop novel photonic materials in which disorder is exploited as a resource, to control light emission and transport, for future generations of optical devices. The use of light to communicate and process information is widely recognised as the technology that will drive innovations in the 21st century across a wide range of areas, from information technology, energy and sensing, to healthcare. So far, control of light flow has been achieved by carefully and periodically structured materials, which can bend light, slow it down and stop if for a short time, to allow for the processing steps to take place. Due to advances in theoretical, computational and nano-fabrication capabilities we are no longer restricted to well-defined periodic structures. Instead we can construct complex systems made of apparently random patterns, which when suitably designed, can lead to performances superior to those offered by conventional photonic systems. The proposed project will focus on the development of hyperuniform disordered nanophotonic materials, a novel class of photonic structures in which structural correlations and disorder are accurately controlled. Discovered in 2009, these new materials have already attracted considerable attention as they combine the robust properties of periodic systems with the flexibility of disordered ones. We will explore the properties of hyperuniform media with the goal to control light flow, to enhance light emission, and to construct novel type of lasers and optical circuits. The research proposed will enhance UK's capabilities in disordered photonic materials, laser technology and integrated photonics circuitry, will have direct impact on more efficient and cost effective photovoltaic power generation and efficient lightning; the advanced optical capabilities to be enabled by our research will support the constant exponential growth of the "internet of things".

The remarkable success of the internet is unquestioned, touching all aspects of our daily lives and commerce. This success is fundamentally underpinned by the tremendous capacity of unseen underground and undersea optical fibre cables and the technologies associated with them. Indeed, the initial surge in web usage in the mid-1990s coincides with the commissioning of the first optically amplified transatlantic cable network, TAT12/13 allowing ready access to information otherwise inaccessible. In parallel with the consistent exponential increase (quadrupling every 4 years) in broadband access rates, optical transceivers used in the core of the communications network have typically grown in bandwidth at the same rate, excepting a small and temporary downturn associated with the introduction of coherent technologies. Today, just as broadband demands begin to outstrip the capabilities of the incumbent technology (twisted pair copper cables) requiring new technology (optical fibre) to be deployed, bandwidth demands in the core network are exceeding the capabilities of single carrier modulation. In this project we will develop low cost all optical techniques to continue to expand the bandwidth of the transceivers which power the internet. Our all optical solution has the potential to be compact, suiting applications both within data centres operated by the likes of Google, Facebook and Microsoft and within the core international networks. The solution will address important challenges at such high bandwidths, such as synchronisation, noise and digital signal processing. If successful EEMC2 will deliver a transponder with more than an order of magnitude more capacity than those commercially available, equivalent of a Gb broadband connection rather than 70 Mb.

For most users today, connecting to the Internet ("access") is done wirelessly, either by WiFi or mobile data networks. Yet the unseen high-speed backbone of the Internet depends almost exclusively on fibre optic networks. To provide the higher data rate wireless access demanded by users to support increasingly sophisticated services and applications, wireless cell sizes must be reduced, presenting numerous challenges. One such challenge is how to distribute the signals to each radio access point. This problem will be exacerbated in future wireless networks operating at higher carrier frequencies in the millimetre-wave or sub-terahertz bands, due to greatly reduced propagation distances at these frequencies. One solution is to use radio-over-fibre techniques, using optical fibre to connect the central office or base station to the access points. Thus, the optical fibre will be pushed closer to the user, with radio providing only the final, short hop. As an alternative to radio, an optical signal could be used to make that last wireless link (optical wireless access), producing a scenario where the interconnection between the optical network and the wireless access is even more seamless. Another challenge brought about by the increased number of access points is that of energy consumption. Indeed, the biggest - and growing - contribution to energy consumption in the communications network is in the area of wireless access. Connecting the optical and wireless networks together in as seamless a manner as possible would offer advantages by reducing the energy lost in converting optical signals into wireless transmissions. This project aims to bring together key groups already carrying out work on various aspects of wireless access and optical networking. It will create a physical network to interconnect existing test-beds at the different universities, using an established research optical network - the National Dark Fibre Infrastructure Service. This will foster collaboration between the groups with their complementary expertise and encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas, with the aim of finding optimal solutions for different wireless access scenarios. Beyond the physical network of test-beds, it is planned that this consortium will form the core of a Network of Excellence of researchers working in this area, which will encourage and promote collaboration with and between other university and industrial groups, both in the UK and internationally.