Novel smart modules for imaging, communications, and displays

This dissertation proposes and demonstrates novel smart modules to solve challenging problems in the areas of imaging, communications, and displays. The smartness of the modules is due to their ability to be able to adapt to changes in operating environment and application using programmable devices, specifically, electronically variable focus lenses (ECVFLs) and digital micromirror devices (DMD). The proposed modules include imagers for laser characterization and general purpose imaging which smartly adapt to changes in irradiance, optical wireless communication systems which can adapt to the number of users and to changes in link length, and a smart laser projection display that smartly adjust the pixel size to achieve a high resolution projected image at each screen distance. The first part of the dissertation starts with the proposal of using an ECVFL to create a novel multimode laser beam characterizer for coherent light. This laser beam characterizer uses the ECVFL and a DMD so that no mechanical motion of optical components along the optical axis is required. This reduces the mechanical motion overhead that traditional laser beam characterizers have, making this laser beam characterizer more accurate and reliable. The smart laser beam characterizer is able to account for irradiance fluctuations in the source. Using image processing, the important parameters that describe multimode laser beam propagation have been successfully extracted for a multi-mode laser test source. Specifically, the laser beam analysis parameters measured are the M2 parameter, w0 the minimum beam waist, and zR the Rayleigh range. Next a general purpose incoherent light imager that has a high dynamic range (>100 dB) and automatically adjusts for variations in irradiance in the scene is proposed. Then a data efficient image sensor is demonstrated. The idea of this smart image sensor is to reduce the bandwidth needed for transmitting data from the sensor by only sending the information which is required for the specific application while discarding the unnecessary data. In this case, the imager demonstrated sends only information regarding the boundaries of objects in the image so that after transmission to a remote image viewing location, these boundaries can be used to map out objects in the original image. The second part of the dissertation proposes and demonstrates smart optical communications systems using ECVFLs. This starts with the proposal and demonstration of a zero propagation loss optical wireless link using visible light with experiments covering a 1 to 4 m range. By adjusting the focal length of the ECVFLs for this directed line-of-sight link (LOS) the laser beam propagation parameters are adjusted such that the maximum amount of transmitted optical power is captured by the receiver for each link length. This power budget saving enables a longer achievable link range, a better SNR/BER, or higher power efficiency since more received power means the transmitted power can be reduced. Afterwards, a smart dual mode optical wireless link is proposed and demonstrated using a laser and LED coupled to the ECVFL to provide for the first time features of high bandwidths and wide beam coverage. This optical wireless link combines the capabilities of smart directed LOS link from the previous section with a diffuse optical wireless link, thus achieving high data rates and robustness to blocking. The proposed smart system can switch from LOS mode to Diffuse mode when blocking occurs or operate in both modes simultaneously to accommodate multiple users and operate a high speed link if one of the users requires extra bandwidth. The last part of this section presents the design of fibre optic and free-space optical switches which use ECVFLs to deflect the beams to achieve switching operation. These switching modules can be used in the proposed optical wireless indoor network. The final section of the thesis presents a novel smart laser scanning display. The ECVFL is used to create the smallest beam spot size possible for the system designed at the distance of the screen. The smart laser scanning display increases the spatial resoluti on of the display for any given distance. A basic smart display operation has been tested for red light and a 4X improvement in pixel resolution for the image has been demonstrated.

High speed nonlinear optical components for next-generation optical communications

Electronic signal processing systems currently employed at core internet routers require huge amounts of power to operate and they may be unable to continue to satisfy consumer demand for more bandwidth without an inordinate increase in cost, size and/or energy consumption. Optical signal processing techniques may be deployed in next-generation optical networks for simple tasks such as wavelength conversion, demultiplexing and format conversion at high speed (≥100Gb.s-1) to alleviate the pressure on existing core router infrastructure. To implement optical signal processing functionalities, it is necessary to exploit the nonlinear optical properties of suitable materials such as III-V semiconductor compounds, silicon, periodically-poled lithium niobate (PPLN), highly nonlinear fibre (HNLF) or chalcogenide glasses. However, nonlinear optical (NLO) components such as semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), electroabsorption modulators (EAMs) and silicon nanowires are the most promising candidates as all-optical switching elements vis-à-vis ease of integration, device footprint and energy consumption. This PhD thesis presents the amplitude and phase dynamics in a range of device configurations containing SOAs, EAMs and/or silicon nanowires to support the design of all optical switching elements for deployment in next-generation optical networks. Time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy using pulses with a pulse width of 3ps from mode-locked laser sources was utilized to accurately measure the carrier dynamics in the device(s) under test. The research work into four main topics: (a) a long SOA, (b) the concatenated SOA-EAMSOA (CSES) configuration, (c) silicon nanowires embedded in SU8 polymer and (d) a custom epitaxy design EAM with fast carrier sweepout dynamics. The principal aim was to identify the optimum operation conditions for each of these NLO device configurations to enhance their switching capability and to assess their potential for various optical signal processing functionalities. All of the NLO device configurations investigated in this thesis are compact and suitable for monolithic and/or hybrid integration.

Communications inspired linear discriminant analysis

We study the problem of supervised linear dimensionality reduction, taking an information-theoretic viewpoint. The linear projection matrix is designed by maximizing the mutual information between the projected signal and the class label. By harnessing a recent theoretical result on the gradient of mutual information, the above optimization problem can be solved directly using gradient descent, without requiring simplification of the objective function. Theoretical analysis and empirical comparison are made between the proposed method and two closely related methods, and comparisons are also made with a method in which Rényi entropy is used to define the mutual information (in this case the gradient may be computed simply, under a special parameter setting). Relative to these alternative approaches, the proposed method achieves promising results on real datasets. Copyright 2012 by the author(s)/owner(s).

Automatic code generation of overlapped communications in a parallelisation tool

This paper addresses the exploitation of overlapping communication with calculation within parallel FORTRAN 77 codes for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structured dynamics (CSD). The obvious objective is to overlap interprocessor communication with calculation on each processor in a distributed memory parallel system and so improve the efficiency of the parallel implementation. A general strategy for converting synchronous to overlapped communication is presented together with tools to enable its automatic implementation in FORTRAN 77 codes. This strategy is then implemented within the parallelisation toolkit, CAPTools, to facilitate the automatic generation of parallel code with overlapped communications. The success of these tools are demonstrated on two codes from the NAS-PAR and PERFECT benchmark suites. In each case, the tools produce parallel code with overlapped communications which is as good as that which could be generated manually. The parallel performance of the codes also improve in line with expectation.

Cooperative communications in ultra-wideband wireless body area networks: Channel modeling and system diversity analysis

In this paper, we explore the application of cooperative communications in ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless body area networks (BANs), where a group of on-body devices may collaborate together to communicate with other groups of on-body equipment. Firstly, time-domain UWB channel measurements are presented to characterize the body-centric multipath channel and to facilitate the diversity analysis in a cooperative BAN (CoBAN). We focus on the system deployment scenario when the human subject is in the sitting posture. Important channel parameters such as the pathloss, power variation, power delay profile (PDP), and effective received power (ERP) crosscorrelation are investigated and statistically analyzed. Provided with the model preliminaries, a detailed analysis on the diversity level in a CoBAN is provided. Specifically, an intuitive measure is proposed to quantify the diversity gains in a single-hop cooperative network, which is defined as the number of independent multipaths that can be averaged over to detect symbols. As this measure provides the largest number of redundant copies of transmitted information through the body-centric channel, it can be used as a benchmark to access the performance bound of various diversity-based cooperative schemes in futuristic body sensor systems.