The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded Lucent Technologies two contracts valued at $26 million -- a contract worth $13.4 million for the second phase of the Coherent Communications Imaging and Targeting (CCIT) program, as well as a $12.5 million contract for the Integrated Router Interconnected Spectrally (IRIS) program.
Under the CCIT contract awarded by DARPA, Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and the New Jersey Nanotechnology Consortium (NJNC) will lead a team to research and develop new secure, high-speed and long-range laser-based communication technologies. The CCIT program addresses the critical need for secure high-data-rate communications and imaging from land, sea and airborne platforms to space. The resulting system will offer communication up-link speeds in the multi-gigabit per-second range as well as provide aberration- free three-dimensional imaging at distances of more than 1,000 kilometers. One of the key enabling technologies for the CCIT project are Micro Electric Mechanical System (MEMS) Spatial Light Modulators.
The four-year IRIS award, administered by the US Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., will be used to develop the architecture, components and prototype systems for all-optical packet routing in high-speed telecommunications systems. This includes the development of an optical packet router that can send and receive up to 100 terabits of data per second. The project involves the development of dense, highly integrated photonic circuits that allow traffic in the network to be switched at speeds below a nano-second. The Bell Labs team's goal is to integrate more than 100 active components in an optical communications system onto a single chip. Other members of the Bell Labs-led IRIS team are: the University of California at Santa Cruz, Lehigh University, and Agility Communications. http://www.lucent.com
- In February, Lucent was awarded a one-year, $11.5 million award to research, develop and demonstrate an ultra-high capacity, highly secure ad-hoc wireless communications system for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Mobile Networked Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) program.
