Presented here is the course I am teaching, emphasizing optical fiber technology alongside essential programming techniques.
SKET 4523 (Optical Communication Systems): This is the course for undergraduate program. This course will provide students with an understanding of optical communication systems. The first part of this course will review basic properties of light, fibers and waveguides. In this part, the emphasis is on the fiber transmission characteristics such as attenuation, absorption, scattering, dispersion and fiber bending loss which influences optical communication system performances. The second part of this course will cover light sources and detectors used in optical transmitter and receiver systems. Basic principles of Light Emitting Diode (LED) and laser as optical sources, and its suitable power launching and coupling technique will be discussed. As for the detectors, p-n junction photodiode (PN), positive-intrinsic-negative photodiode (PIN) and avalanche photodiode (APD) will be covered to gain understanding on receiver performance issues including noise, sensitivity and bandwidth. The last part of this course will introduce students to optical link power budget and rise time budget analysis as a guideline in designing optical communication systems
MKET 1333 (Optical Communication): This is the course for postgraduate program. This course addresses fundamental and contemporary issues of optical communications, communication components, and state-of-the-art applications found in current literature publications. A student should understand (i) propagation of light in fiber, (ii) the operation principles of active and passive optical communication components, and (iii) the principles of designing optical communication systems. A student should be able to design and technically analyze optical communication systems. In addition, a student should be able to search for reference, and critically review primary journal articles in the field of optical communications.
MKET 1563 (Advanced Optical Fiber Communications): This is the course for postgraduate program. The aim of this course is to equip students with knowledge on advanced optical fiber communications. It starts with an extensive introduction to the development history of optical communications. The main components and modules required for the implementation of WDM optical communication network is then explored. The course then explores the theoretical and practical aspect of signal propagation through an optical fiber. Factors affecting the signal quality along the optical fiber are then covered which include studying the various noise sources and the way they affect the signal quality. Advanced modulation techniques and detection system employed for achieving high spectral efficiency will be covered next. The course will be concluded looking at the recent trends in advanced optical network.
SKEE 1033 (Scientific Programming): This is the course for undergraduate program. This course introduces the fundamentals of scientific programming languages and techniques used by engineers to solve engineering problems. Students will be introduced to common scientific programming languages and their comparative advantages and disadvantages. Emphasis is placed on fundamentals of programming, program design, verification and visualization. The goal is to provide the students with the skills in scientific computing, tools, techniques that can be used to solve their own engineering problems. Students will learn to implement algorithms using high level programming language. The programming skills acquired in this course will allow students to go beyond what is available in pre-packaged analysis tools, and code their own custom data processing, analysis and visualization for any engineering problem.
