Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Ming C. Wu

Arkadev Roy

Postdoctoral Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Arkadev Roy obtained his Ph.D. Degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology in 2023. He completed his BTech degree in Electronic and Electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2018. Currently, he is a postdoc scholar at UC Berkeley and his work focuses on opto-electro-mechanical systems and heterogeneous integration.

BSAC Spring 2024 Research Review Presenter

Daniel Klawson

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ming C. Wu (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2025 (Anticipated)

Daniel graduated with honors from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2020 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. He is a first-year doctoral student in the Ming Wu Integrated Photonics lab researching photonic integrated circuits for scalable trapped ion quantum computers.

BSAC Spring 2023 Research Review Presenter

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Wafer-Level Integrated Microlens Couplers for Efficient and Scalable Photonic Circuit I/O

Jianheng Luo
Ming C. Wu
2024

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) hold significant promise in applications such as data center networks, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, quantum computing, and LiDAR, thanks to their energy efficiency and large communication bandwidth. By leveraging the infrastructure and technologies of conventional CMOS foundries, the development and manufacturing costs of PIC chips are significantly reduced. However, the commercialization of PIC products faces a critical challenge in optical packaging, which currently accounts for three times the cost of the PIC itself. Among...

Efficient 3D Vision for Autonomous Driving

Philip L. Jacobson
Ming C. Wu
2024

Self-driving vehicles have long been envisioned as a massive leap forward in transportation technology. Although several efforts to developing fully autonomous vehicles are currently being undertaken in both industry and academia, so far none have achieved the promise of full self-driving. Of the challenges in building the autonomous software for self-driving cars, one of the most prominent is perception, or the ability for the vehicle to sense the world around it. To meet the requirements for practical deployment onto autonomous vehicles, perception systems must meet four key metrics of...

BPN986: Integrated Microlens Coupler for Photonic Integrated Circuits

Jianheng Luo
Johannes Henriksson
2024

We design and experimentally demonstrate a new silicon photonic fiber coupling method using integrated microlens couplers. Efficient, broadband and polarization-insensitive coupling to a single mode fiber with a best coupling loss of 0.8 dB is achieved.

Project currently funded by: Industry Sponsor

**Project merged with BPNX1012 on 08/14/2024**

BPNX1010: Foundry-Compatible Silicon Photonic MEMS Switch

Arkadev Roy
Erik Anderson
Daniel Klawson
Yiyang Zhi
Sirui Tang
2024

Integrated silicon photonic switches can serve as primary building blocks for low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects for communication in data-intensive scenarios ranging from servers in datacenters to chiplets in multi-chip integrated packages. Our group has been developing MEMS-based large-scale silicon photonic switches which are particularly attractive for their low-loss, high-extinction, and low-power performance as well as sub-microsecond switching speed. Previous demonstrations, although fully compatible with CMOS foundries, relied upon a custom fabrication stack. The goal of the...

BPNX1009: Piezoelectric Silicon Photonic MEMS Switch

Joseph Suh
2024

Integrated silicon photonic switches enable routing of optical signals and real-time reconfiguration of the optical networks in data centers and high performance computers. Reducing the operating voltage while preserving the required switching properties is vital to realize their full potential for real-time routing driven by CMOS electronics. Silicon photonic MEMS switches, based on electrostatic actuation, have employed high voltages because of constraints in mechanical designs aimed at eliminating parasitic effects. On the other hand, recent developments in piezoelectric thin...

Joseph Suh

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

BPNX1012: Optimization of Integrated Microlens Couplers for Wafer-Scale Packaging

Sirui Tang
Jianheng Luo
Johannes Henriksson
2024

Despite the current widespread use of silicon photonics, fiber coupling remains one of the principal challenges in mass production. Integrated microlens couplers (IMCs) have been demonstrated as an efficient, broadband, and polarization-insensitive method for wafer-scale fiber-to-chip coupling, with a previously achieved free-space coupling loss of 0.6 dB. In this project, our goal is to further improve the performance and enhance the fabrication robustness of our IMCs. Specifically, we are replacing the polymer with hard material and developing a design that balances rotational and...