An all-Canadian research project to study photonic systems for telecommunications applications has been instigated at the McGill University, in Montreal, Canada. The $2.75m five-year programme will study ways to link circuit board components optically for high-speed telecommunications processing. In addition to McGill, the founding parties include Bell-Northern Research, Northern Telecom Ltd and the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council. The programme will explore the optical interconnection of ‘smart pixels’, or optoelectronic integrated circuits; according to the partners, the goal is to develop the equivalent of high-density optical wires to interconnect smart pixels, thereby creating processing components complementary to existing electronics technology. By interconnecting smart pixels in this way, faster and more intelligent hardware systems will be able to better support voice, data, image and multimedia applications, say the organisations.
