| 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.
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