FROM THE
DIRECTOR’S DESK
As CIAN approaches its final year of NSF funding I’m happy to say that we
are moving towards a sustainable future. CIAN expertise and capabilities are
solidly planted in the Future of the Internet, including Silicon photonics, SDN
(software defined networking) and optical devices with emphasis on energy,
size and cost reduction.
Throughout these years, CIAN’s goal has been the creation of transformative
network systems by addressing bottlenecks in existing networks to unlock
future scalability, delivery of 100 Gb/s peak rates to subscribers, low latency,
network management and control for dynamic bandwidth allocation, energy
efficiency and low cost.
Nasser Peyghambarian
CIAN Director
Over the last year, CIAN’s achievements include a wide range of advances
spanning devices to systems. New software defined inter data center optical
functionality was demonstrated. System innovations include adaptive mod-
ulation with the potential to scale optical channels to 1 Pb/s with greater
efficiency and higher performance, software defined optical networking and
CIAN’s goal is the creation
of transformative network
systems by addressing
bottlenecks in existing
networks to unlock future
scalability, delivery of
100 Gb/s peak rates to
subscribers, low latency,
network management
and control for dynamic
bandwidth allocation, energy
efficiency and low cost.
smart electrical grid control algorithms for greater resilience to disaster or at-
tack events, a flexible all optical transmission node with energy efficient op-
tical grooming. New insights were provided on network bottlenecks through
an analysis of network capacity distance scaling. At the device level, planar
silicon photonic switching chips set records for speed and port counts, a sili-
con photonic optical add drop chip was made athermal, and a second gener-
ation CIAN chip incorporating silicon photonic chip foundry manufacturing
methods was designed and fabricated.
The CIAN system-level research is being transferred to companies through
its industry and education programs, with commercial adoption of early
CIAN architecture innovations already underway. Our ties to our industry
partners are more important than ever, and we aim to develop more in-
depth partnerships this year.