Nokia is at the forefront of global communication systems, providing products and innovations in IP and cloud networking, as well as ultra-broadband fixed and wireless access to service providers and their customers, enterprises and institutions throughout the world. Bell Labs, an integral part of Nokia, is the driving force behind innovations that have shaped the networking and communications industry. Nokia Bell Labs France, located in Nozay, south of Paris, is a large R&D site open to its ecosystems and partners in the Paris-Saclay campus. Over 180 researchers are working on research topics spanning photonics devices, optical transmission systems and networks, end-to-end mobile network solutions, software defined wireless networks, networks algorithms and control, cyber security, mathematics of complex dynamic networks, network energy, and software for telecoms.

Main tasks in PICTURE:

Members of the WDM transmission department of the Smart Network Fabric (SNF) lab in Nokia Bell Labs will be responsible of:

• Defining the specifications and the target performance of the photonic integrated circuits at the beginning of the project. Electrical and optical specifications will be provided to the other work packages to ensure interoperability between the building blocks of the PIC (lasers, drivers, modulators, multiplexer and amplifier at TX side and coherent receiver, photodiodes and TIAs at RX side). Target performance, required optical power levels and maximum electrical power consumption will also be defined.
• Demonstrating PIC transceivers containing III-V/Si-Photonic technologies by the third year of the project and evaluating their performance over relevant transmission distances. The first 100Gb/s PAM4 PIC will tackle short reach direct-detection systems whereas the second 400Gb/s 16QAM PIC with a tuneable laser will address wideband IP-transport and IP-routing coherent-detection systems.

Photos from our lab:

lasers and transmitters	fiber spools and optical amplifiers	large bandwidth receiver

For system-level performance assessment, Nokia Bell Labs will use its high speed optical transmission setups comprising high-speed DACs and scopes to generate and acquire 64GBaud signals as well as various transmission scenarios to emulate multi-reach heterogeneous infrastructures of optical links. We will also run all the offline digital signal processing including algorithms for equalization of channel impairments for both direct detection and coherent detection systems.

Previous experience related to silicon photonics

The WDM transmission department of the SNF lab has been involved in several research projects in the past years on the topics of coherent detection and advanced modulation formats, among which European H2020 project TIPS (thermal management in pluggable transceivers) and national projects CALIPSO (ultra large bandwidth systems) and MODAL (multimode transmission for datacenter interconnections). Tasks and work packages lead by members of the department covered definition of specifications of optical transmission systems and sub-systems, development of system-level demonstrators, and performance assessment over various optical links (submarine, terrestrial or short-reach applications).

Nokia Bell Labs is also widely recognized as a leader in advanced transmission systems, having reported advances in the field of high speed communication and coherent detection in regular and post-deadline sessions of the latest editions of the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) and the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference.

The following persons will be primarily responsible for carrying out the research and innovation activities.

Dr Gabriel Charlet

Gabriel Charlet received an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d’Optique in 1999 (Orsay, France) and a PhD in physics in 2011 from University Paris XI. He joined Alcatel Research and Innovation (now Nokia Bell Labs France) in 2000. Since then he has been working on WDM transmission systems and realized several multi-terabit/s transmission records. He also addressed the topic of advanced modulation formats. He is the first author of more than 40 papers including 10 Postdeadline papers in major conferences and more than 35 patents. Since 2008, he leads the WDM transmission group which intends to further increase total bit rate transported in an optical fiber without compromising the transmission reach. In 2007, he received the “Fabry de Gramont” award for his work on fiber optics communication. In 2010, he has been selected by the Technology Review from MIT (TR35) as one the 35 innovators below 35 years for his work on 100Gbit/s product using coherent detection. In 2011, he has been selected by Fast Company as one of the 100 most creative people in business and received also the World Technology award in communication technology.

Dr Elie Awwad

Elie joined Nokia (ex- Alcatel-Lucent) Bell Labs in 2015 as a research scientist, where he is working on designing modulation formats and digital signal processing algorithms for optical transmission systems and optical sensing. Before that, he was a researcher at Institut Mines-Télécom, Télécom ParisTech, Paris (2011-2015) where he worked on emerging coding techniques for optical MIMO transmission systems and received his Ph.D. in January 2015. He has published over 20 technical papers in leading journals (IEEE JLT and OSA Optics Express) and conferences (OFC, ECOC, ICC, SPPCOM) and is the author of 4 patents. He is also a regular reviewer of several scientific journals (Optics Express, IEEE JLT, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Optics Letters, Photonics Letters) and has served as reviewer for some IEEE conferences.