Philip Watts is an EPSRC Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. His research interests cover optical interconnects and electronic signal processing, control and coding circuits for optical communications. He has authored/coauthored more than 40 refereed journal and conference papers in these fields. Philip's current research within the Optical Networks Group aims to understand the system performance and power consumption implications of photonic interconnect for future computer networks.

He obtained the BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Nottingham in 1991. From 1991 to 2000, he worked at BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre (Chelmsford, UK) on the development of optical systems including diode pumped lasers, coherent optical sensors and adaptive optics. From 2000 to 2002, he was senior optical hardware engineer with Nortel Networks (Harlow, UK and Ottawa, Canada) with responsibility for next generation DWDM optical demultiplexer product development. He obtained the MSc in Technologies for Broadband Communications in 2003 and a PhD in 2008, both from UCL. Philip's PhD research investigated electronic dispersion compensation for high speed optical communication and included collaborations and consultancy with Intel Research, Azea Networks Ericson and Huawei Technologies. He was awarded the IEEE LEOS (now IEEE Photonics Society) postgraduate student fellowship in 2006. From 2008 to 2010, he held the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Brunel Research Fellowship at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he initiated his current research on photonic computer networks leading to the award of the EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship in 2010 and appointment as lecturer at UCL in 2011.

Philip Watts' current research is investigating the performance and power consumption implications of integrated photonic interconnect for future large scale computer systems (such as data centres and high performance scientific computing) focusing on:

• Performance modelling of computer systems with photonic networks using software simulation and FPGA-based full system emulation
• Power modeling and experimental verification of integrated photonic components and electronic network elements
• Design of power optimised physical and data link layer protocols for photonic interconnect

The work is currently supported by EPSRC and Xilinx. In addition, he contributes to research on digital signal processing for optical networks, in particular the generation of advanced modulation formats such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).

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