The Wire-Less World of Rod Tucker

Professor Rodney Tucker: pivotal role in world telecommunications revolution

It began so simply - copper wire, a capacitor and resistor, backing board, an aerial running out the window to the downpipe, a tiny ‘magical’ crystal, and from the old bakelite headphone came faint, beautiful, music.

Ten-year-old Rod Tucker was struck with wonder. His new-found passion soon steered him from crystal sets to short-wave radios. His Saturday mornings became assaults on army disposal stores for old valves and other parts, and his bedroom steadily filled with electronics and do-it-your- Australia’s youngest holder of self radio magazines. On his 16th birthday he became ham radio license Australia’s youngest holder of a ham radio license … he’d already built his transmitters well in advance of reaching the minimum age to be an operator. That night he erected his antenna and talked with someone on the other side of the world.

“It was a fantastic moment.”

A hobby that changed communications forever

It was a defining moment too and brings into sharp relief the pivotal role that Rod Tucker today plays in the world’s telecommunications revolution. That first inter-continental Building test equipment from contact by the teenage Tucker using equipment he built discarded materials from discarded parts was little more than 30 years ago. Two-way radio, submarine cables, teleprinters and manned telephone exchanges still had another decade to run as the backbone of global telecommunications. The fax machine, for example, is barely 15 years old and on the way out. Email is only now becoming a common tool, and it’s life span likely to be just as short.

So reflect for a moment on the leap from 30 years past to 30 years ahead when the technology that is emerging from the adult Rod Tucker’s continuing passion for electronics Vast increase in carrying and telecommunications is in common use. He is largely capacity of communications responsible for the carrying capacity of networks telecommunications technology to jump from a few thousand bits per second to tens of billions of bits per second. In 10 to 20 years time the Internet in its present form will seem as quaint as the first overland telegraph.

“We are on the brink of a quantum leap forward in computer processing power, optic fibre technology and the equipment interface with humans,” says Tucker.

Predicting the future form of telecommunications

He predicts many items now in common use, from the personal computer to the television and telephone will disappear, in their current form, over the next 30 years. And the enormous capacity of the telecommunications Telecommunications allowing conduits will allow a person to effectively be in two places people to be effectively in at once – so lifelike will be his or her image being two places at once transmitted and received. The entire wall of a conference room, for example, might be the transmitted 3D image coming from another meeting. The resolution of that image will be so high that people will converse as if in the same room.

It sounds like science fiction, but Rod Tucker knows what he’s talking about. He is one of the world’s leading scientists in the field and is the man responsible already for revolutionising the carrying capacity of the global communications network.

An Australia Prize for work In 1997 he was awarded the prestigious Australia Prize for in optical fibre technology his work in dramatically boosting optical fibre capacity by solving the problem of ‘bottlenecks’ caused during the conversion of data in its electrical form to data in a light form.

Now, he says we are using less than one per cent of optical fibre capacity.

“Imagination is the only limiting factor. Optical fibre Imagination the only limiting could easily handle the demands that a new technology like factor ‘telepresence’ would place on it," he says. "The main work to be done before telepresence becomes a reality is the development of more advanced terminal equipment at each end of the optical fibre, plus faster information processors and less intrusive hardware."

2 Telepresence, he explains, will come from a merging of virtual reality, high definition/three dimensional television, Telepresence: combining and telecommunications. It will allow a person to sit in virtual reality with high- definition television their home or office and ‘video-conference’ with people in another state or even in another country, time zone differences not withstanding.

“What they'll see and hear will be virtually indistinguishable from if they were physically there,” says Tucker.

Tucker says that using telepresence, sports fans will be able to ‘attend’ major events from their lounge chair. “It'll be as if they were in the stadium for big games, no matter where they're held.”

Revolutionary result from fundamental

It might be tempting for some people to dismiss Rod Academic eccentricity or Tucker’s visions as the product of academic eccentricity, plain genius? but he is as down-to-earth as they come. When he travels – using conventional physical modes like flying in a jet plane – Rod Tucker writes ‘engineer’ on customs forms … “because that’s what I am.”

But he is also professor of electrical engineering at Melbourne University where he heads the Photonics Research Laboratory in the Australian Photonics Cooperative Research Centre.

“A lot of the technology we’re working with now, wasn’t even thought of when I was an undergraduate here in the late 1960s.”

“But the fundamentals haven’t changed. It’s still all about Basic engineering electrons in a semi-conductor and how they move and how they generate photons, in particular, light. And it’s a complete understanding of these fundamentals that characterises engineering - the ability to not just follow a cookbook approach, but to have the depth of understanding to go laterally in many different directions.”

3 “Going forward, for example, often requires us to go back over fundamentals that in an earlier era were skimmed over, like quantum electronics – how light reacts with matter. It was seen, when I was studying, as having little immediate use. But now that optical fibres are so fundamental to telecommunications, a greater understanding of quantum electronics is essential.”

The importance of a ‘can-do’ environment

Engineering as a natural From his own youthful experiments, Rod Tucker progression of youthful proceeded naturally to electrical engineering at Melbourne curiosity University where he completed his Ph.D. in 1975.

He won a prestigious Harkness Fellowship to study for two years at an American University. The rules of the scholarship were that he also spends three months travelling through America to absorb its culture.

“So I bought a car and visited 48 states, becoming more and more excited by the vibrancy of the electronics industry there.”

Inevitably the trip took him to Silicon Valley where he found, to his surprise and gratification, his Ph.D. work in Research work attracting interest in Silicon Valley Melbourne on new technologies for using transistors in microwave systems had attracted great interest. It led to a job as a consultant and he became yet another example of Australia’s ‘brain-drain’.

“In America I was in an exciting can-do environment where new ideas were welcome. It still doesn’t really exist in Australia.”

Tucker then moved to Plessey Electronics in the United Kingdom for a short time, before returning to Australia and a job at the University of Queensland (UQ).

“It was an important turning point. I believe engineers need to redefine themselves occasionally … change direction … and this was my chance.”

Shifting interest from “At Plessey I was working in microwave engineering. But microwave engineering to

4 optical fibre technology in the late 1970s optical fibres were starting to look interesting. So I took the opportunity of the job change to redefine myself as an optics specialist.”

In modern communication systems utilising an optical fibre connection, faxes and telephone traffic are digitised by converting them into electrical signals in a sequence of ones and zeroes. This digital data is fed into a laser where it's converted to light, which represents a one. Darkness is a zero. The data is then fed through optical fibre to its destination where it's converted back to electricity for reconversion to voice, fax or other data.

“In simple terms it’s a bit like Morse code. When the electrical signal is 1, the light is on. When it is 0, the light is off. The difference is that Morse code had a maximum capacity of a few bits per second. A modern optical fibre link is handling 10 billion bits of information every second.”

At the time Tucker was re-inventing himself as an optics engineer, the first optical fibre communications systems could handle only a few thousand telephone calls Studying the limitations of simultaneously. It was not the capacity of the fibre that laser technology was the limitation, but the speed of the laser in delivering digitised light information – essentially, the speed with which the device was able to turn light on and off.

The push from the corporate research sector

Tucker was asked by Telecom Australia (now Telstra) if he could help clear this electronic logjam. He began by exploring the physics of the laser. He used computers to Australian technology model new devices and predicted how they could be made limitations to operate faster. In order to test his predictions, Tucker left Australia in 1983 for AT & T's Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. "At that time, there was no way to build advanced semiconductor lasers in Australia."

In an effort reminiscent of his amateur radio days, Tucker traded and borrowed components, assembling them, making different connections, transmitting data through them, measuring the results, conducting detailed electronic and optical tests, all aimed at building a picture of how a superior laser could be built.

5 The heart of the laser is called the active stripe. It's where the electrons injected into it from electrical contacts are converted to photons. The structure and dimensions of those contacts proved to be very important to the success of Tucker's work. His efforts focussed on components one third of a millimetre square and very thin – so small you can hardly see them with the naked eye.

“There is a complex relationship between all these Re-engineering the laser components,” he says. “The key was readjusting them all device in concert, and my research uncovered a number of effects which limited the ability of electrons to be quickly converted to photons. By re-designing the physical structure of the device, I was able to show how these effects could be removed.”

As a result of this restructuring, a new generation of lasers was developed that can handle 100,000 telephone calls simultaneously instead of the few thousand that were previously possible. Every time you pick up your telephone and talk long distance, it's via a new high speed laser, resulting from Rod Tucker's research.

The telecommunications link between Melbourne and Sydney today is 1000 times greater than the capacity of the Carrying capacity of networks will greatly increase in previous microwave link, but Tucker says it’s only the another 30 years start: “It’s not going to stop. In another 30 years our telecommunications capacity will be 1000 times more than today.”

He says that eventually the vast majority of traffic on the network will be in the form of multimedia on a ‘souped-up’ Internet dominated by services such as interactive libraries, entertainment, education, home shopping and telepresence. “These will use thousands of times more bandwidth than a simple telephone call … so I expect communications companies could eventually throw in phone calls for free.”

Information revolution and social issues

Tucker is aware of a growing mood in some sections of the Concerns about information community, worldwide, against information technology, on overload

6 the grounds people are drowning in information. He argues it’s a matter of perspective.

“For the Internet to give me the same information in the same time as it takes me to scan through a newspaper it would need to have 1000 times more capacity than it has today … we’re a long way from matching the enormous capabilities of the human eye. The ultimate aim in all this progress is simply to be able transmit around the world large amounts of information, such as images, that look real and utilise hardware that blends into your environment. Big bulky objects like televisions and desktop computers can disappear.”

He believes the more immediate use of the expanding capacity will be in the corporate and education sectors for Corporate and education events such as video conferences: “At the moment they’re sectors: big beneficiaries of information expansion a bit like watching Neil Armstrong from the moon, but soon the clarity will be greatly improved and will eventually develop into life-like 3D images.”

“The issue from a ‘public good’ perspective is relevance and impact, so there does need to be ongoing debate so people understand the technology and how to use it wisely. In a time of diminishing fossil fuel reserves and increasing greenhouse gas emissions, telecommunications will grow in importance, but technologists alone should not determine the future.”

Tucker returned to Australia in 1990 and is now working on techniques for manipulating data through the optical network. One of these is called optical networking. It's an Next-century application of attempt to connect users to a network of optical paths optic fibre technology employing light of different wavelengths or different colours which can all be transmitted simultaneously. "This is a next century application," he says.

A related area of his work is wavelength division multiplexing, where two or more lasers set at different wavelengths pump data into optical fibre. “You then separate the two colours at the other end using two detectors, and thereby multiply the capacity of the system,” says Tucker. “In principle, if you could get things organised at either end, it would be possible to transmit more than a billion telephone calls simultaneously on optical fibre as thin as human hair.”

7 Pursuing interests outside the laboratory

Tucker's prime interest outside the laboratory is the history of the European discovery and exploration of Australia. He collects maps made by early European explorers. Like his passion for communications, Tucker's other interests – mountaineering, canoeing and bushwalking – may have been inherited from his great, great grand uncle Samuel Dawson, a member of an 1870 surveying party for the overland telegraph between Adelaide and Darwin.

Tucker says the world's communications network is the largest and most complex thing ever built by human kind. He predicts that by 2020 it will be hundreds of times bigger than it is now. “The future Internet will give instant access to anything you want anywhere in the world.”

“I spend a lot of my time rummaging around seeking information, so I look forward to a time when information on the latest developments is available to me instantaneously.”

There's one thing, he concedes, hasn’t changed since he first transmitted on his home-made ham radio: “I still get a buzz from the idea of communications across vast spaces.”