19 March 2009

Infinera and OSA Foundation Announce New Student Prize

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Lyndsay Meyer
The Optical Society
+1.202.416.1435
lmeyer@osa.org

Infinera and OSA Foundation Announce New Student Prize

WASHINGTON, March 19—The OSA Foundation and Infinera today announced the establishment of the Infinera Outstanding Student Recognition prize. This prize will go to a student that exhibits outstanding optical communications research in the area of optoelectronic devices and photonics integration.

The finalists were selected from the pool of student submissions to the Optoelectronic Devices category for this year’s Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/ National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) being held March 22-26 in San Diego. Submissions were reviewed and scored by the OFC/NFOEC technical program committee and finalists were selected based on standard OFC/NFOEC paper review criteria. Finalists will be judged by the conference general chairs, program chairs and a representative from Infinera based on their innovation and research excellence.  A $1,500 prize will be bestowed upon the winner during the OSA Foundation reception at OFC/NFOEC.

“We are very pleased to offer this new award to up-and-coming researchers in optoelectronics,” said Dave Welch, co-founder and chief marketing and strategy officer of Infinera. “Infinera believes innovation is critical to the future of our industry and this award will help stimulate and recognize innovation among the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

Finalists for the Infinera award are:

• Akram Akrout, Lab de Photonique et Nanostructures, CNRS, France
  Paper: Generation of 10 GHz Optical Pulses with Very Low Timing Jitter Using One Section Passively Mode Locked Quantum Dash Based Lasers Operating at 1.55 µm

• Aaron Albores-Mejia, COBRA Research Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
  Paper: Low-Penalty Monolithically-Cascaded 1550nm-Wavelength Quantum-Dot Crossbar Switches

• Rene Bonk, Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
  Paper: 1.3/1.5 µm QD-SOAs for WDM/TDM GPON with Extended Reach and Large Upstream/Downstream Dynamic Range

• Chen Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  Paper: Push-Pull Modulation of Coupled-Cavity VCSELs

• Alberto Gatto, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  Paper: VCSEL to VCSEL Injection Locking for Uncompensated 40-km Transmission at 10 Gb/s

• David Geisler, University of California at Davis, USA
  Paper: 3 b/s/Hz 1.2 Tb/s Packet Generation Using Optical Arbitrary Waveform Generation Based Optical Transmitter

• Ming-Fang Huang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
  Paper: 42.8-Gb/s Chirp-Managed Signal Transmission over 640-km SSMF with Large Dispersion Tolerance

• C. H. Kwok, Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK
  Paper: Two-Electrode High Power Tapered Laser with up to 40.5 W/A Static Modulation Efficiency and 700 Mb/s Direct Modulation Capability

• Sheng Liu, Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton, UK
  Paper: An Optical Frequency Comb Generator as a Broadband Pulse Source

• Vojtech Olle, Centre for Photonic Systems, University of Cambridge, UK
  Paper: 20 GHz Picosecond Pulse Generation by a 1300nm Mode-Locked Quantum Dot Master Oscillator Power Amplifier

• Devang Parekh, University of California at Berkeley, USA
  Paper: 90-km Single-Mode Fiber Transmission of 10-Gb/s Multimode VCSELs under Optical Injection Locking

• Juan Petit, Institut Telecom, Telecom ParisTech, France
  Paper: Enhanced 10-Gb/s NRZ Transmission Distance Using Dual Modulation of an Integrated Electro-Absorption Modulated Laser Transmitter

• Molly Piels, Univ. of California at Santa Barbara, USA
  Paper: Microwave Nonlinearities in Ge/Si Avalanche Photodiodes Having a Gain-Bandwidth Product of 300 GHz

• Xiankai Sun, California Institute of Technology, USA
  Paper: Hybrid Electrically Pumped Evanescent Si/InGaAsP Lasers

• Ming-Chun Tien, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, USA
  Paper: Optofluidic Assembly of InGaAsP Microdisk Lasers on Si Photonic Circuits with Submicron Alignment Accuracy

• Haibo Wang, University of Cambridge, UK
  Paper: Lossless Multistage SOA Switch Fabric Using High Capacity Monolithic 4x4 SOA Circuits

• Benjamin Wohlfeil, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany
  Paper: Thermal Limits for Integration of Directly Modulated Lasers with Driver IC on SOI

• Panagiotis Zakynthinos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
  Paper: Wavelength Conversion for NRZ Signals with Enhanced Regenerative Characteristics

• Wissem Sfar Zaoui, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
  Paper: Origin of the Gain-Bandwidth-Product Enhancement in Separate-Absorption-Charge-Multiplication Ge/Si Avalanche Photodiodes

• Lin Zhang, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California, USA
  Paper: A High-Speed Silicon Modulator Based on an Embedded-Ring-Resonator Structure

About Infinera
Infinera provides Digital Optical Networking systems to telecommunications carriers worldwide. Infinera’s systems are unique in their use of a breakthrough semiconductor technology: the photonic integrated circuit (PIC). Infinera’s systems and PIC technology are designed to provide customers with simpler and more flexible engineering and operations, faster time-to-service, and the ability to rapidly deliver differentiated services without reengineering their optical infrastructure. For more information, please visit www.infinera.com.

About the OSA Foundation
The OSA Foundation was established in 2002 to support philanthropic activities that help further the Optical Society's (OSA) mission by concentrating its efforts on programs that advance youth science education, provide optics and photonics education to underserved populations, provide career and professional development resources  and support awards & honors that recognize technical and business excellence. The grants funded by the OSA Foundation are made possible by the generous donations of its supporters as well as the dollar-for-dollar match by OSA. The Foundation is exempt from U.S. federal income taxes under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is a public charity. To learn more about the OSA Foundation or to find out how to donate, please visit www.osa-foundation.org or email foundation@osa.org.

About OFC/NFOEC
Since 1979, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) has been the annual forum for those in the optical communications field to network and share research and innovations. In 2004, OFC joined forces with the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) creating the largest and most comprehensive international event for optical communications. By combining an exposition of 550 companies with a unique program of peer-reviewed technical programming and focused educational sessions, audiences from service providers, manufacturers, network providers and more participate in OFC/NFOEC for the latest advances in optical communications.

OFC/NFOEC, www.ofcnfoec.org, is managed by the Optical Society (OSA) and co-sponsored by OSA, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (IEEE/LEOS). Acting as a non-financial technical co-sponsor is Telcordia Technologies, Inc.