University of California, San Diego University of California San Diego Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering
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Institute Affiliation:
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology

Email:
jeford @ ucsd.edu
Office Phone:
(858) 534-7891
Fax:
(858) 534-1225
 
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Joseph Ford

Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Optical subsystems and devices for applications including telecommunication networks, data storage, and optoelectronic computing
 

Professor Ford's strengths are in transparent fiber optic and free-space optical communication networks, dynamic planar and volume holography, physical and geometrical optics, and opto-electronic device packaging. He has been an innovator in the application of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) to the optical telecommunications infrastructure. For six years at Bell Labs, Ford developed parallel communications systems based on arrays of high speed opto-electronic VLSI and micromechanical devices. He led a team that demonstrated the first MEMS-based components for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) telecommunications, where multiple signals are sent simultaneously through the same fiber by coding the information in different wavelengths. The MEMS-based dynamic spectral equalizer he developed corrects power variances across the individual wavelengths of a WDM transmission. Such variances can disrupt communication, particularly when they are magnified during amplification. Another MEMS-based technology, the wavelength add/drop switch, allows data to be channeled between networks "transparently," keeping the transmission in its optical analog form through the transfer from network to network. This obviates costly delay inducing transformations of the transmission to digital-electronic form before transfer and back again afterwards. A variable attenuator and a dispersion compensator are other fiber-optic "plumbing" fixtures that Ford has helped pioneer for the optical backbone. In his Photonics Systems Integration Lab (PSI-Lab) at UCSD, Ford's research group is working on using both fiber-optic and free-space optical technologies to solve problems in data access, mobile computing, and sensor networks, as well as continuing to focus on the telecommunications infrastructure.

 
Capsule Bio:

Joseph E. Ford joined the UCSD faculty in 2002, after a two-year stint as Chief Scientist at Optical Micro-Machines. From 1994 to 2000, Ford was a principal investigator in the Advanced Photonics Research Department of Bell Labs, where he applied optoelectronics and micromechanics to high-bandwidth computing and communications. In 1992, he earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and applied physics from UCSD, where he remained as a postdoctoral researcher until mid-1993, when he joined 3D optical data storage startup Call/Recall. Ford has co-authored over 100 conference and journal papers, and holds 37 U.S. patents.