Sezer Erkilinc

A PhD-educated optical systems architect with 10+ years of experience, specialized in designing and tailoring application-oriented transceivers in optical fibre communications, underpinned bystate-of-the-art photonics and DSP technologies. Expert in design, performance optimisation, and validation of transmission systems from access, metro and DCIs to Tb/s‑capacity DWDM systems. High technical competence in coherent optics & DSP with hands-on knowledge of HW & SW. 5+ years of experience as a technical leader of optical pluggables and cutting-edge lab test & measurement equipment developments.

Conducted several PoC demos and field trials in Infinera, Fraunhofer HHI, & UCL, led to project acquisitions. Regularly delivering presentations at Int‘l conferences.

Infinera Corporation, UKPrincipal Optical Architect, CTO OfficeJun’24 – Present

• Demonstrate technical excellence by modelling various optical transceiver technologies and transmission scenarios for different fiber types to build strategical partnership with potential customers
• Investigate 1.6Tb/s coherent pluggable modules, linear pluggable optics (LPO) and half-retimed linear optics (LRO) performance through DSP and PIC component modelling (lasers, modulators, TIAs, PDs) 
• Influence on customer needs based on investigation studies for potential future Infinera products
• Present results and findings to strategical partners, e.g., hyperscalers
• Continuing to conduct my responsibilities on P2MP development and transmission outlined below

Infinera Corporation, SwedenHW Development Engineer, R&D DeptDec’20 – Jun’24

• Technical lead of cross-functional optical module development team in Metro R&D HW Dept., for the development of 400G ICE-X (QSFP-DD) pluggables, and the initial dev. phase for 800G (OSFP) pluggable
• Direct Opto-team activities (5 members) during 400G QSFP-DD and CFP2 pluggable development for P2P and P2MP applications, and report progress to stakeholders (incl. executive levels) on a bi-weekly basis
• Demonstrate technical hands-on leadership by building new optical testbeds and implementing automated measurement methodologies to identify system performance limits
• Understand key trade-offs for a module between power/energy, performance (BW, OSNR, BER etc.) over temperature and wavelength, and footprint and assist design teams to achieve critical optical performance specs
• Closely collaborate with HW (Electronics, Mechanics and Thermal), TROSA, DSP and FW teams to satisfy the optical specs (laser power/freq stability, module power consumption and ROSNR, Rx sensitivity performance etc.), and identify, tackle & solve the critical spec-related issues arising during development phase
• Assess optical transmission (ETH/OTN) perf. using DWDM Infinera XTM and GX OLSs (Mux/De-mux, ROADMs, OAs, etc.) for P2P (metro & DCIs) and P2MP (access) applications with horseshoe and star networks
• Plan & execute design validation test cases to optimize optical performance utilizing QAM, PAM-4, OOK
• Advise 400G CFP2 dev. program using similar HW components by giving feedback from QSFP-DD program
• Showcase (lab demos and field trials) XR-Optics for IPoDWDM and PON scenarios and provide customer support (TEF, BT, Juniper, Sumitomo etc) using 3rd-party routers, e.g., Edgecore, UfiSpace, JPX, Cisco routers
• Recruit and supervise new Opto engineers joining Metro R&D HW-Opto team 
• Interface with PLM team to contribute product requirements documents (PRDs), compliances such as OIF 400ZR, OpenZR+ and OpenROADM MSAs for next-generation optical modules
• Publish in peer-reviewed journals and give presentations at conferences, mainly ECOC and OFC (see page 3)
• Manage lab facilities and liaise with external HW suppliers to accommodate test and qualification requirements

Fraunhofer HHI, Germany Senior R&D Research Engineer Sep. '18 – Nov.’20

• Coordinated Fraunhofer HHI leg of an international EU project in optical metro transport networks to deliver project milestones whilst working closely with external partners (e.g., optical vendors and component manufacturers) to deliver work packages and report the progress.
• Designed high-speed, yet cost-effective, coherent-lite optical transceivers for PONs and DCIs operating at ≥100Gb/s/λ utilizing innovative photonic integrated components and demonstrating their proof of concepts
• Conducted systems experiments using 25G/100G pluggable optical transceiver modules (QSFP-, CFP2-) and optimizing performance using novel DSP-based mitigation techniques. 
• Led the development of state-of-the-art lab test & measurement equipment, 100GHz CoRx Frontend, in collaboration w/ Tektronix, for ≥400Gb/s optical applications and act as the primary point of contact
• Prepared BoM to build the equipment and performed required optical tests to achieve the desired specs
• As a technical expert, managed customer requirements by offering technical assistance and solutions before and after the sales in terms of performance, reliability, and scalability. 
• Showcased the prototype OFC and ECOC exhibitions via live demos to develop relationships with potential and existing customers 
• Liaised with customers, e.g., ADVA, NICT, and Huawei, to discuss their technical requirements.
• Took charge of writing the product spec and published press releases for advertising purposes (see page 3)
• Developed advanced software tools for quantitative analysis, data acquisition and instrument control and involved in simulation modelling of optical transmission experiments prior to experimental validations 
• Prepared and presented projects and prototype ideas to potential collaborators. Established a collaboration with Huawei Research Centre which has started in Jan 2022 (after I left) to develop an optical transceiver, operating at high-symbol rate (>130GBd) for optical metro and access networks
• Provided hands-on technical support to clients for tailoring coherent DSP of hybrid fiber-optical/terahertz-wireless links for 100 Gb/s THz communication
• I

University College London, UKPhD in EE Eng Oct. '11 – Dec. '15 Thesis: Cost-effective spectrally-efficient optical transceiver architectures for metropolitan links

• Studied low-cost optical transceiver architectures using simplified coherent or direct-detection technologies for metro and access links. Analyzed complexityversus performance trade-offs

 Rochester Inst. of Technology, USAMSc in EE Eng. Sep. '09 – Jul. '11 Thesis: Page layout analysis and image classification for complex scanned document GPA: 3.78/4.00 Koç University, Turkey BSc in EE Eng.Sep. '05 – June '09Project: Optimal distance bounds fast search on compressed time-series queriesGPA: 3.34/4.0 – Rank: 4/52