Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Despite the widespread adoption of silicon photonics, fiber coupling remains a major challenge for large-scale manufacturing. Our group has previously demonstrated integrated microlens couplers (IMCs) as an efficient, broadband, and polarization-insensitive solution for wafer-scale fiber-to-chip coupling, achieving a free-space coupling loss as low as 0.6 dB.

In this project, we replace polymer-based IMCs with hard-material SiON microlenses formed by transferring the lens profile from photoresist (PR) to SiON using anisotropic etching. By optimizing the oxide-to-nitride ratio, we...

Scaling trapped-ion quantum computers to solve practical problems requires dense, broadband, and fabrication-compatible optical interfaces. Current photonic integrated circuit (PIC) approaches are limited by per-device optical bandwidth, restricting achievable ion densities. We present a monolithically integrated quantum photonic platform for trapped-ion control that leverages additive manufacturing to enable scalable three-dimensional optical routing. Our device integrates waveguides and microscale printed focusing elements directly with a surface-electrode ion trap. We experimentally...

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...