Issue 2

Research in photonics links between academic and industry

PolyU has a long track record of research excellence in photonics, including optical communications, sensing, energy, imaging, and biomedical applications. The research team from the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering collaborate extensively with the industry leading to numerous world-record breaking experiments, technology commercialisation achievements, and spin-off companies. Over the past decade, important strides in the basic understanding of light and optical devices have also been made in the PolyU community. Moving forward, it is clear that research in photonics is getting more interdisciplinary, and often needs to combine the underlying physics with fabrication techniques and performance characterisation in specific applications, to partner with signal processing and other Big Data machine learning analysis. Fundamentally new cross-disciplinary and holistic approaches are needed to achieve true breakthroughs. PolyU has a special advantage in this aspect as we have numerous internationally-accomplished colleagues in their respective areas of photonics and this has led to the establishment of the Photonic Research Institute. The missions of the new research institute are:

• To advance fundamental knowledge of photonics and develop cutting edge engineering applications
• Secure additional large research funding
• To build state-of-the-art facilities in photonics and collaborate with industry for knowledge transfer and commercialisation
• To establish PolyU as a platform for testing and characterisation for academics and industrial pradictioners in the Asia-Pacific region
• To create an effective and conducive ecosystem for spin-off companies in photonics
• To create impact stories, social benefits and economic contributions for Hong Kong, Foshan, the Greater Bay Area (GBA), China and the world

In terms of research output, photonics has been a major driver of high-impact publications in PolyU. Our research is also regularly featured as front-page covers in various journals and media in Hong Kong and overseas.

We also have tremendous experience in collaboration with the industry. Fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors installed in the MTR and projects worldwide has become the signature example of knowledge transfer in PolyU over the past decade. In communications, PolyU has worked extensively with Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Huawei) in the past 15 years on various aspects of optical communications, successfully helping them define technology standards and develop signal processing algorithms for system implementation. Our collaboration with Huawei has also become the blueprint for Huawei's university collaboration worldwide. We have also collaborated with companies all over the globe with an aggregate funding amount exceeding 50M HKD. Besides Huawei, below are some companies we have worked with over the past 20 years.

In addition to extensive industry collaboration, we have also spun-off a few start-up companies in the past 2 decades. For example, Amonics Ltd. is a world-leading optical amplifier manufacturer that originated from one of Prof. Hwa-yaw Tam’s PhD students. Plugtech Precision Systems Limited specialises in bias control for optical modulators which developed from the final-year project students working in our Optical Communications and Networking Research Laboratory with Prof. Chao Lu.