National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT)

CNIT is a non-profit, university-generated consortium of 37 Italian universities. CNIT brings together member and partner staff and facilities to the aim of coordinating innovation in the field of telecommunications. CNIT aims at promoting and coordinating research in telecommunications; fostering partnerships among industries, operators, public and private research centres; providing training programs, stimulating initiatives of scientific research and divulgation. CNIT research topics are mobile communications, optical satellite and radio-links communications, digital signal processing, telecommunications networks, telematics, intelligent transport systems, remote sensing and radar, television, information theory, multimedia communications, telecommunications security, electromagnetic compatibility, optical and microwave components and circuits, electromagnetic diagnostic, environmental impact of telecommunications systems, propagation and antennae.

In TeraSlice, CNIT is responsible for the project website creation and maintenance, contributes to the model assessment and specifications refinement for final demo through system-level simulation tools and it collaborates for the characterization of various subsystems thanks to dedicated setups for optical coupling and RF probing of photonic chips. However, CNIT main contribution concerns the TeraSlice photonic ADC demonstration and its application in radar systems. CNIT makes available its demonstrators and facilities for implementing an ultra-wideband and multiband radar system and an ESM system based on TeraSlice ADC, and it exploits its knowledge and its collaboration for carrying out a comparison with the main conventional systems.

Prof. Antonella Bogoni Professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’anna, former head of research area of CNIT, is one of the pioneers of the Integrated Research Center for Photonic Networks and Technologies created in Pisa in 2001 as a part of a broad agreement among four partners, CNIT, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Marconi Communications S.p.A. (now Ericsson) and the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), aiming to create in Pisa a world-class Center of Excellence, where currently she is leader of the “Digital & Microwave Photonics” research team. After more than a decade dedicated to photonics technologies for optical fiber networks and ultra-fast all optical signal processing, Prof. Bogoni’s interests gradually moved to microwave photonics for 5G and radars. In the last years her team is actively contributing in communication and sensing for Security, Space and Automotive. Moreover she is leading projects for the development of photonics-based sensors (lidar and radar) and communication subsystems on chip. Through an ERC starting grant and two additional ERC “proof of concept” grants, her team developed the first photonic-based fully digital radar system first, and then converted the obtained research results into a pre-industrial product for airport security and environment monitoring. Her publication on NATURE on 2014 about the first photonic-based radar represents a milestone and reference point for all the research community focused on microwave photonics for radar systems. In 2015 she is coordinator of the H2020 project: “ROAM: Revolutionising optical fiber transmission and networking using the Orbital Angular Momentum of light”. In 2017 and 2018 she is the coordinator of three projects on photonic integration for Space funded by the European and Italian Space agencies.