Academic and Industrial Collaboration “at the Speed of Light”

by

Teresa Hagen

With a little help from his industry friends, Alan Willner is leading his students on a search for the end of the rainbow.  He might not find a pot of gold, but he could very well uncover the technological riches to be mined from the use of light and its hundreds of refracted colors. “You can have 100 (wavelength multiplexed) colors all being modulated with their own data stream at, say, 10 or 40 gigabits per second, and they’re all going down a single optical fiber,” explained Willner, who is a professor of electrical engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “Since data bits become distorted due to all kinds of physical-layer problems, there has been a lot of research to figure out how to make all this happen in the most efficient method possible.

“I was hired at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the late ‘80s in their research department, which was performing pioneering work on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) for optical fiber systems,” Willner recalled. “The first undersea transatlantic cable was (sending data) at about 280 megabits per second, whereas now, even commercial systems are sending a terabit (per second) over a single strand of optical fiber.”

Since the eighties, the Internet has exploded as both an economic and communication powerhouse, creating challenges for companies to provide ever-faster and more reliable connections at minimal cost. Enter Willner and a group of Ph.D. students that work in his fiber optics lab, add three corporations with different approaches to this problem, and let the brainstorming begin.
 
Willner, who joined USC in 1992 and received the National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House, specializes in high speed optical fiber communications research. Over the past few years, he and his students have established close partnerships with leading researchers in industry. In particular, Willner’s lab receives funding from Cisco Systems, HP, and Intel, with incredibly valuable and active technical collaborations resulting from the funding dollars. “This close interaction creates a unique educational experience, producing a Ph.D. graduate that is uniquely suited for future engineering challenges,” Willner said.

Willner first engaged in collaboration with Cisco Systems, Inc., working closely with Dr. Loukas Paraschis, technical leader for the Advanced Technology and Network Planning Group. “My students and I are working with Cisco to achieve longer reach, reduce complexity/cost, and provide higher performance,” said Willner. “These systems can be fairly complex, so my students perform both experimentation and simulation to find design guidelines for future networks. And who better to work with than Loukas and Cisco on communication networks!”

“Alan’s research has provided multiple benefits for Cisco, most notably new innovative ideas and excellent collaborations,” added Paraschis. “He has also provided some of the most exciting seminars/tutorials. And, of course, his students are top-notch.”

According to Willner, “My students simply love interacting with Loukas, have a very deep respect for him, and have published several research papers with him. He is an endless source of encouragement, inspiration and technical insight, helping them identify the ultimate potential for making a future commercial impact.”

Meanwhile, Willner had also nurtured a relationship with Intel. He and his students work closely with Dr. Mario Paniccia, director of the Photonics Technology Lab, who specializes in silicon photonics. By using photons instead of electrons, optics is a promising breakthrough technology for interconnections in and around future PC’s and servers. Furthermore, manufacturers could someday build optical components from silicon, a more cost-effective material compared to the exotic materials used for today’s optical devices. “Mario’s team has the potential to revolutionize optical hardware as we know it, and my students are thrilled to interact in the process with his outstanding and innovative people,” said Willner.

“We all think that Alan has put together one of the top optical networking labs in the country. He has the infrastructure to do very long distance transmission and networking measurements as well as the modeling and simulation capabilities to explain the experimental results,” Paniccia responded when asked about the advantages of working with Willner and USC. “My feeling of Alan is he’s a pleasure to work with, he’s very focused, and his time at Bell Labs has given him a valuable industrial perspective. He understands how ’applied science’ works and tries to instill that in his students. We routinely have his students intern with us here at Intel and that futher enhances our working relationship.”

Research that investigates the high-speed interconnections within an electronic chip has recently partnered Willner with HP and Dr. Ray Beausoleil, principal scientist for HP Labs.  Beausoleil’s specialty is nanophotonic crystal devices, a promising technology that can control light within tiny spaces and be applied to information processing.

“When you have many chips with a huge number of high-speed transistors packed very densely, you have a lot of power consumption and critical clock distribution challenges. These are big problems and big money issues for the microprocessor industry,” said Willner. “So you look to see if optical interconnects can connect transistors in a more efficient way, with lower power and higher speed in a more efficient architecture. That’s a big win and a huge limitation buster.”

There is plenty of mutual admiration and respect in the HP/USC relationship. “Alan, his students and his post docs have become well known for their system modeling capabilities,” commented Beausoleil. “I like the way their models gather the non-ideal characteristics of the physical building blocks of the network, and they try to find the limitations that physics imposes. It’s generally much more valuable to build an end-to-end model of an optical system when you’ve gotten all the physics right. One of the things that I really appreciate as someone who hires is that Alan is teaching (his students) how to learn, how to stay curious, how to not be afraid to dive into an area where they don’t know anything at all.”

Willner doesn’t mince words in his own high regard for Beausoleil. “Ray is the consummate explorer, thinks about the big picture, and is a natural mentor to my students. He helps the student connect physical issues to a grand vision. What a great role model for young people!

“The research projects with Cisco, HP and Intel are all collaborative, which I love, and hopefully we bring value to the companies,” Willner added enthusiastically. “It is great for my students who have direct access to scientists and researchers at each company--I’m only there to help facilitate the interaction. In fact, I believe that this is a key difference between me and many other professors around the country. I encourage the students to communicate directly with the industry collaborators. The benefits to students are enormous: developing team spirit, developing trust with the collaborators, developing project management abilities and developing communication and leadership skills.  Also, most of them are going to be working in industry, and this interaction gives them a perspective on their future that they would not otherwise experience. They gain keen insight as to how companies evaluate their own ‘pain’ when looking at future challenges.”

Willner is also quick to note that “these collaborations could not flourish without the encouragement and wisdom of the VSoE’s administration. Companies always point out that USC is very easy to work with. USC has a can-do attitude in terms of making things possible, rather than making it harder. Non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property issues are so much more straight-forward at USC. Provost Nikias’ and Dean Yortsos’ emphasis is always on building long-term valuable relationships, not putting stumbling blocks in the way.”