Photonics has moved from a niche industry to being embedded in the majority of deployed systems, spanning sensing, biomedical devices and advanced manufacturing, through communications, ranging from chip-to-chip and wireless access to transcontinental scale, to display technologies, bringing higher resolution, lower energy operation and new ways of human-machine interaction. Its combination with electronics enables the Digital Future.
The Government's UK Semiconductor Strategy and UK Wireless Infrastructure Strategy both recognise the need for highly trained people to lead developments in these technology areas, the Semiconductor Strategy referring explicitly to the role of CDTs in filling the current shortage of highly trained researchers. Our proposed CDT has been designed to meet this need.
Currently manufactured systems are realised by combining separately developed photonics, electronic and wireless components. This approach is labour intensive and requires many electrical interconnects as well as optical alignment on the micron scale. Devices are optimised separately and then brought together to meet systems specifications. Such an approach, although it has delivered remarkable results, not least the communications systems upon which the internet and our Digital Future depends, limits the benefits that could come from systems-led co-design and the development of technologies for seamless integration of photonics, electronics and wireless. Our proposed CDT aims to provide multi-disciplinary training enabling researchers to create the optimally integrated, energy efficient, systems of the future.
To realise such integrated systems requires researchers who have not only deep understanding of their specialist area, but also an excellent understanding across this interdisciplinary area ranging across the fields of photonics, electronics and wireless, hardware and software.
We aim to meet this important need by building upon the uniqueness and extent of the Cambridge and UCL research programmes, where activities range across materials for future systems; higher levels of electronic, photonic and wireless integration; the convergence of wireless and optical communication systems; combined quantum and classical communication systems; the application of THz and optical low-latency connections in data centres; techniques for high capacity access networks; the substitution of many conventional illumination products with photonic light sources and extensive application of photonics in medical diagnostics and personalised medicine. Future systems will increasingly rely on more advanced systems integration, and so the CDT supervisor team includes experts in electronic circuits, wireless systems and enabling software. By drawing these complementary activities together it is proposed to develop an advanced training programme to equip the next generation of very high calibre doctoral students with the required technical expertise, RRI, ES, commercial and business skills to enable the > £24 billion annual turnover UK electronics and photonics manufacturing industry to create the optimised, closely integrated systems of the future. The PES CDT will provide a wide range of learning methods for research students, well beyond that conventionally available, so that they can gain the required skills. In addition to conventional lectures and seminars, for example, there will be bespoke experimental coursework activities, educational retreats, reading clubs, road-mapping activities, RRI and ES studies, secondments to companies and other research laboratories and business and entrepreneurship courses.
Students trained by the CDT will be equipped to expand the range of applications into which these technologies are deployed in key sectors of the Digital Futures and wider economy, such as communications, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, data processing, defence, energy, engineering, security and medicine.
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