Bio

Dessislava Nikolova is a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University where her current research is on photonic systems for optical interconnects, networks and quantum communications. Prior to that Dessislava was awarded the prestigious European wide Marie Curie Fellowship to study magneto-plasmonics at the University College London. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Antwerp University with research in the area of optical networks. Her work was recognized by a Best Paper award at the SPECTS symposium and led to a patent. She has also worked for Alcatel-Lucent, researching passive optical networks. Her future research goal is to design accessible, easily controllable, multifunctional photonic systems thereby opening the field of active nanophotonics to computer scientists and network engineers.

Silicon photonics for Exascale systems

Silicon photonics for Exascale systems

Driven by the increasing use and adoption of cloud computing and big data applications, data centers and high-performance computers are envisioned to reach Exascale dimensions. This will require highly scalable and energy efficient means for data exchange. Optical data movement is one of the promising means to address the bandwidth demands of these systems. Optical links are being increasingly deployed in data centers and high-performance computers but to facilitate the increased bandwidth demand and provide flexibility and high link utilization, wavelength routing and optical switching is necessary. Silicon photonics is a particularly promising and applicable technology to realize various optical components due to its small footprint, high bandwidth density, and the potential for nanosecond scale dynamic connectivity.

My research focusses on the design, modelling and demonstration of novel silicon nanophotonic devices and systems for energy efficient optical data movement. In particular I aim to provide solutions for highly scalable silicon photonic switch fabrics. Within this work several architectures for spatial and wavelength switches with silicon photonic microrings are proposed and demonstrated. Analytical modeling and simulations show that the proposed architectures are highly scalable. By developing simple but accurate device models critical for the switching performance device parameters are identified and their optimal values are derived. Experimental demonstrations confirm the feasibility of these silicon photonic switches. The proposed devices can form the building blocks of the future flexible, low-cost and energy efficient optical networks that can deliver large volumes of data with time-of-flight latencies.