One of the cool projects that I presented last week at TechConnect Summit (which by the way was a great success. Congrats to Jennifer for the organization!), is a wearable photonic colored fibers developed by Pr. Maksim Skorobagatiy at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal.
Smart textiles are now everywhere (Frost and Sullivan estimates that in 2020, 80% of the textile will be smart!). Applications already include interactive clothing for sports, hazardous occupations, and military, industrial textiles with integrated sensors or signage, fashion accessories and apparel with unique and variable appearance, etc…
Mainly because of their commercial availability but also their low cost, photonics textile manufacturers usually use silica glass-based telecommunication fibers which cause several challenges in the textile world (How to extract the color from the fiber core? How to generate the color? How to weave them? etc…).
Here comes Pr. Skorobogatiy’s invention!
Instead of using glass-based fibers, he proposes to use photonics crystal fibers made of different layers of polymers which will act as a spectral filter. Therefore, from a single white light source, only a given color will be leaked out of the fiber.
No more need to paint the fiber or to use 3 RGB LED, the color is defined by the fiber design itself (geometry, polymers used, etc…)!
Finally, one of the cool properties of Maksim’s fibers is their ability to change color by mixing the reflected ambient light with the irradiated guided light (inside the fiber).
Under the daylight illumination, and in the absence of guided light, in the fiber is still colored. Consequently, when both the ambient illumination and guided light are present, the overall color of the fiber will be determined by mixing of the two colors in the radiation far field (ex : green + red = yellow).
Applications of this new invention include the development of variable colored uniforms or signs. It could also be used as an anti‐counterfeit label or an intelligent jewelry.
One of our patent application has just been successfully reviewed by the USPTO and is now allowed for issuance as a patent: a new SPR biosensor developed by Prof. Skorobogatiy at Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal.
Prof. Skorobogatiy proposes the miniaturization of waveguide-based SPR biosensors. This miniature biosensors operate from IR to visible wavelengths while providing comparable sensitivity to its laboratory predecessors.
The first challenge overcome to achieve portability was to satisfy phase matching condition between waveguide mode and plasmon by employing a multilayer photonic crystal waveguide with a low refractive index core. This enables tuning of the effective refractive index of the Gaussian-like core mode anywhere from zero to the core dielectric. Phase matching with plasmon at any desirable wavelength is achieved using any material combination for the waveguide.
About Univalor’s IP Portfolio:
Between 2001 and 2008, about 520 discoveries arising from Université de Montréal and its affiliated institutions have been evaluated by Univalor and more than 900 patents applications have been filed. Univalor currently has approximately 265 patents and patents pending in its portfolio.
Raman Kashyap and Amirhossein Tehranchi have reached a new milestone towards the direction of pure RGB colors. They propose to use a fiber based wavelength converter as an RGB source. Do you think it could be used within a pico projector?
A first prototype is currently being developed. First publications and simulation results are however already available.
Just to be clear, I’m not an employee of Techconnect organization, but I’m a user of this forum and a great fan, and I try to disseminate my true motivation with that kind of even both internally and externally.
This year was the third time in three that we participated to Techconnect Summit (http://www.techconnect.org/Summit2008/). If you have been there this week of June 2008 in Boston, you certainly heard about the “photonic guitar”. Thanks to Raman Kashyap, the inventor and to Pierre-Matthieu Demizieux, his student, that was us (http://techupdateunivalor.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/88/)!
If you were not able to be there, you should plan next year. Why’s that? First of all, you will be able to see another great invention from one of the institutions Univalor serves! But more importantly, whatever you are involved in technology transfer from university or other organization, or an industry player or an investor, that’s certainly the kind of place you want to be every year. In a very compact 2-3 days show, you will be able to meet with representatives from the industry whom, through their vision of the future of their company, will be able to define areas of interests. You will be able to meet with investors in your new technology based venture. You will be able to meet with researchers and technology transfer professionals to access worldclass technologies and R&D capabilities. All of the above having in common the fact that they consider innovation as a driver for growth.
Let’s hope that there will be more and more initiatives such as Techconnect Summit so we can streamline the process of technolgoy transfer. It could be in many ways, area or domain specific, it could be virtual as well.
And if you are skeptical about such match-making conference, I am pretty sure you will find organizations, such as ours, that made deals following such an event. More than that, I made friends almost all over the world!
The June edition of Vector is now available! Everything you want to now about Protein tagging, Dry AMD, Filterless Image Sensor and Treatmen of Celiac disease is inside. Come and take a look.
Didier, Morgan and myself are working on new projects:
- Process to build 3D microstructures in real time and in the ambiant condition
- Optical Fiber Structure for Laser Cooling of Solids
- Real-time File transfert monitoring system over a network (Internet, Wireless, etc…)
- Optimized Nanocalorimeter
- Optical device for RBG generation (application targeted: digital projector)
Feel free to contact us if you’re interested in one of them.
After Photonics West, AUTM, and WBT, we’ll be featuring 5 of our technologies at the TechConnect Summit 2008
The TechConnect Summit is focused on bringing together the world’s top technology transfer offices, companies, and investment firms to locate the most promising technologies and early stage companies from across the globe.
It’ll be the third time that we’re going to participate in this summit. This is THE place to make great contacts within universities, venture capitalists and companies (Just look at their Review Board…). We recomment everyone to go, but… DON’T forget your business cards!
February 25, 2008 at 9:40 pm
· Filed under Optics, Photonic
As a classical guitar fan (my boyfriend won my heart playing Asturias), I am keen on the pure sound of an acoustic guitar. But as the spouse of a guitar hero, I will feel indebted to the inventor of an instrument that will allow my personnal Django Reinhardt to work on his next masterpiece without ruinning my favorite TV show.
This could be possible using Professor Kashyap’s photonic guitar:
The process is really simple. On the frame of an acoustic guitar, Prof. Kashyap has replaced the usual nylon strings with a multimodeoptical fiber in which a laser light circulates. From this simple substitution emerges a new sound alchemy.
Hitting of one string generates a wave, which is transformed into an electrical signal using a photosensor. This signal is finally sent to a classic audio system with amplifiers and speakers (or headphones depending on your neighbours’ musical sense).
To finally convince any guitar hero, I could add that stopping the strings along the instrument’s fretboard produces the usual musical scale progressions, as on any guitar and that the full harmonic richness of a note is preserved.
If your music lover looks more like Syd Barrett than Joaquín Rodrigo, tell him/her that as any tone of the harmonic series can be isolated, it can be amplified at will. That can lead to a much more sophisticated richness of timbre than what we find on an electrical instrument.
Prof. Yves-Alain Peter, École Polytechnique de Montréal, developed a tunable fiber laser able to tune over the C-Band.
This system uses a Fabry-Perot cavity actuated by an electrostatic comb drive, developed by Yves-Alain as well, to tune the fiber laser.
This allows a very compact integration, as well as large and fast tuning of wavelength.
This fiber laser finds applications in telecommunication, laser machining and bio-mechanical sensor using high quality integrated tunable fiber lasers.
Yves-Alain’s system is now protected by a US provisional patent application and we’re seeking an industrial partner interested in commercializing it. Further info is available on Flintbox. Interested in learning more?
As we are back from Photonics West 2008, we’re managing to maintain contact with all great people we’ve met there, whatever we shared with them the floor of the Canadian Photonic Consortium booth (by the way, our thanks to Sylvie Couture and Sadiq Hasnain!), we met during the exhibit or we met during face-to-face meeting or networking events organized by both Canada and Quebec. Overall, we had great fun sharing our booth with Mireille Gourde (Thomas, Mireille and myself at Photonics West 2008) from the Vice-rectorat à la recherche et la création of Université Laval – (see their available technologies).
Please note that we also shared the booth space with École Polytechnique de Montréal, one of Univalor’s supporting institution, and we presented many photonics’ related technology from this institution.
Credits for the pictures are to Marouchska Brisebois (Marouchska and myself at Photonics West 2008) from the Canadian Institute for Innovations in Photonics (CIPI), an interesting organization for connecting industry to technology in Canada in the field of Photonics. Whatever you are a researcher or a company, CIPI can certainly help you! I hope Robert Corriveau, CIPI’s President, will not blame me for saying that we’re working on ways to enable these match-making opportunities by providing seamless information about technologies available from canadian institutions!
So now, it’s time to prepare Photonics West 2009, and gather more institutions and their technology transfer affiliates! If you are interested, please contact me: didier.leconte@univalor.ca
