Leader in Integrated ICT Hardware & Systems
Professor of Photonics
Richard Penty is Professor of Photonics at Cambridge University and Master of Sussex College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
His main research interests lie in the field of photonics. He has worked for many years on short reach photonic networks for in-building links. This included working on the ethernet standards and is now concentrating on advanced modulation format approaches to realising 100Gb/s photonic links using a single optical source. In parallel he has research on polymer waveguide links and sub-systems for on-board and board to board, including backplane, applications.
He is involved in research studying the energy efficiency of photonic networks and how these can be improved, in co-operation with higher layers in the network stack, to provide better energy efficiency for the internet. His research on radio over fibre for in-building radio coverage has resulted in the spin out Zinwave.
He has also carried out research on broad area RFID systems, where the detection range of passive RFID tags has been greatly improved. Research is now continuing on localisation using passive RFID. The spin out company PervasID has been formed to commercialise the RFID research.
Within Cambridge he chairs the School of Technology’s Research Committee and is a member of the University’s Research Policy Committee. He has served on various boards including being a Director of Zinwave, eComm and PervasID. He has formerly been on the technical advisory boards of PHYworks Ltd and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation and is currently on the TAB of Zinwave and PervasID. He has served on the advisory boards of EPSRC III-V Epitaxy Centre and the SFI PIFAS project. In 2015/16 he was a member of UCC’s Research Assessment panel as well as being Chair of the Research Review of Technical University Denmark’s Fotonik Department.
He is currently a member of the EPSRC College and reviews grant applications for a wide range of international organisations including SFI, DAAD, QNRF, the Hong Kong grant body etc. He is a regular reviewer for IEEE and OSA journals and is the Editor-in-Chief of IET Optoelectronics. He has served as a TPC member for major international conferences such as OFC, CLEO etc. and was/is co-chair of the local organising committee for ECIO 2010 and QCRYPT 2017.
Richard is the co-author of in excess of 700 refereed papers and is a regular invited speaker at conferences. He is the Programme Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Photonic Systems Development. He is a founder of Zinwave, PervasID and EComm.