Posted February 2, 2012 Atlanta, GA
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Optical Wireless Applications (COWA), housed in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The new center will be mainly supported by participating industry members for the first five-year period, including seed funding from the NSF. It will substantially impact the advanced technology of optical wireless systems and applications for imaging, sensing, and communication networks. A joint effort with Pennsylvania State University, COWA will be led on the Georgia Tech side by Gee-Kung Chang, Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar and Byers Endowed Professor in Optical Networking at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Mohsen Kavehrad, a chair professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will lead the Center’s efforts at Penn State.
The goal of the center is to foster an innovative research environment driven by industrial needs to develop leading edge, radio-over-fiber technologies for delivering multi-gigabit, multi-band wireless services over optical access networks with 100x more capacity at higher bit rates and longer reach than current wireless communications. Four ECE professors at Georgia Tech–Nikil S. Jayant, Raghupathy Sivakumar, Stephen E. Ralph, and John R. Barry–will work with Dr. Chang in this new center. Their research tasks will include developing integrated opto-electronics components with smart optical-wireless interfaces necessary to facilitate collaborative functions and features among digital, RF, and optical systems.
About the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is one of eight schools and departments in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top 10 of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. Over 2,500 students are enrolled in the School’s graduate and undergraduate programs, and in the last academic year, 723 degrees were awarded.
Over 110 ECE faculty members are involved in 11 areas of research, education, and commercialization – bioengineering, computer systems and software, digital signal processing, electric power, electromagnetics, electronic design and applications, microsystems, optics and photonics, systems and controls, telecommunications, and VLSI systems and digital design.
About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the world's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities and the eighth best engineering and information technology university in the world by Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, Georgia Tech’s more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Business, and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and minority engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
