on 04-04-2022
Europe's demand for high-speed broadband bandwidth has literally reached outer space. Direct broadcast, broadband multi-media, and broadband internet access requirements are driving the development of next-generation telecom satellites and are expected to be a key revenue generator.
In this context telecom satellites have entered the "multi-beam - multi-gigabit era"; satellites employ multiple beams to provide high-speed connectivity and broad coverage. Operators are pushing for a 10-fold increase in terms of broadband capability but the weight, size, and power limitations are severe bottlenecks to further increases.
It is evident that a change in technology both in terms of payload architecture and beamforming realization is necessary and the turn towards photonic technology is inevitable, showing an excellent potential to accommodate efficiently the increased capacity requirements of telecom payloads and at the same time reduce the satellite power consumption, weight and launch cost.
Within the scope of the EU project BEACON, IT was able to demonstrate the first-ever real-time photonic beamformer for processing 4 input Ka-band signals (1Gbit/s QPSK at 28GHz carrier), including an array of modulators, a multi-core optical fiber amplifier, and a silicon photonic integrated beamformer. The photonic processor developed allowed a size reduction by a factor of 5000 compared to other traditional approaches.
Rogério Nogueira (IT Aveiro)
on 04-04-2022
IT was a key part of my development as a researcher.
I joined the Optical Communication Group of IT, at the time led by José Ferreira da Rocha, in 1994, still at an early stage of the institution. Since then, IT has provided me with a very stimulating environment.
Since 2005, we started working on quantum communications. We began to explore the quantum nature of light to implement systems that do things that classical systems cannot do or that can do the same things more efficiently.
Our first quantum work was published in 2006 at a conference on Oporto.
In 2006, we were able to generate and detect single photons. In 2011, we implemented a quantum communication system with polarization coding in IT Aveiro laboratories.
In 2012, we were able to generate entangled photon pairs using spontaneous four waves mixing in a highly nonlinear optical fiber.
Since then, we have been using single and entangled photon pairs to implement new quantum protocols. We have also established a very fruitful collaboration with the theoretical group of Paulo Mateus, from IT Lisbon, who has been developing new quantum protocols and some of which we have been implementing in our laboratory and outside of it.
Indeed, in 2021, we installed a secure quantum link between the Air Force Command and the General Headquarters of the Armed Forces, in collaboration with the Portuguese Defense.
In 2022, we implemented in the Quantum Madrid Network a secure quantum multiparty computing service to support genomic medicine. This has indeed been quite a long journey, but it has not been a solitary journey, I have been accompanied by some very talented students, by several brilliant colleagues from IT and from other national and international research institutions.
There are so many colleagues that deserve credits that I cannot list all of them here. However, in this journey, there are two talented researchers who built with me the IT Quantum Optical Communication Group and to whom I have to thank, Nelson Muga and Nuno Silva. They certainly deserve as much credit as I do for all of our successes over the years.
To finalize, I would like to thank all of you that make IT every day and would like to celebrate the 30 years of IT!
Let’s make the next 30 years even more remarkable because communicating is as crucial now as it was 30 years ago!
Armando Pinto (IT Aveiro)