Research and resources page

Silicon nano/micro photonic devices
 

Nanophotonics is about guiding, confining, and manipulating light at nanometer scale. A similar definition holds for microphotonics devices at micron scale. My research work revolves around exploring silicon based micro/nano photonic devices like  microring structures and photonic crystals etc. In particular i design, fabricate and characterize microring based WDM filters in Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) material system


Specific areas of my Research work :

- Realizing novel microring architectures like MRDC, Doublet Ladder filters etc.

- Realizing extremely compact microrings in SOI material system

- Microring filter synthesis procedure for spectral engineering applications.

- Plane wave method and FDTD based investigation of photonic bandgaps in silicon

- Fabrication of the above mentioned devices on a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) wafer.


Facilities and Tools used:

Nanophotonics Research Lab (ECERF W4-087) is equipped with nano-positioning stages and instrumentation for characterizing and performing experiments with electrooptic devices.

- Nanofab facility at UofA used for fabrication of silicon photonic devices (esp Raith150 E-beam lithography, STS ICP RIE silicon deep etch process)

- In house FDTD and PWE codes for simulations

- Workstations equipped with Matlab and Labview

Nanophotonics resources:

Free nanophotonics software
Nanostructures and Computation
Photonic crystal and photonic band gap links
Nanooptics and plasmonic links
Nanophotonics & Metamaterials lecture notes
ECE 591 lecture notes ( Physics of Optoelectronics by Michael Parker)

SEM pictures of some Silicon photonic devices we fabricated:

A Hexagonal photonic crystal waveguide       A Microring resonator of 1.5 um radius
 

A square photonic crystal waveguide                   A triplet Microring configuration
 
 
                                       Microring assisted directional coupler
                   

Fiber-Radio Communication systems design (Master's Research)

The aim of this research project is to address the issues in the transmission of RF signals like UWB or Wireless LAN signals over cheaper Multimode Optical fiber links which are evolving along with the Gigabit/10G Ethernet standards. These Multimode fiber links are based on 850nm VCSEL laser diodes and Laser optimized Graded Index fibers and is meant for short distances up to 300 to 550 meters for a 10GHz bandwidth. This research would provide a low cost solution for the extension of the coverage range for the wireless networks mentioned.