Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Within the past few decades, the goal of fully-autonomous vehicles has moved from a thought experiment to a potential reality thanks to advances in machine intelligence. One of the key challenges to still be overcome is the building of robotic perception systems which can achieve performance on-par with or surpassing that of humans. Currently, most autonomous driving researchers rely on several different modalities for collecting visual information, namely lidar, radar, and cameras. Although relying on lidar for perception has the drawback of high cost, maturing lidar technology has opened...

We report on 128×128-element two-dimensional silicon photonics focal plane switch arrays with microelectromechanical-system optical switches for random-access optical beam steering. A 70°×70° field-of-view and sub-MHz steering speed are experimentally demonstrated.

We report on 32×32 silicon photonic switches realized through wafer bonding. Broadband operation is demonstrated over 1260-1320 nm range. The maximum on-chip loss is measured to be 4 dB and the cross-talk is −80 dB.

Keywords: Wafer bonding, Optical losses, Optical switches, Microswitches,Silicon photonics, Loss measurement, Optical fiber communication

This project aims to develop integrated FTIR technology for material detection using MEMS-based photonic switch as building block. This implementation of integrated FTIR promises high resolution (1cm^-1) on small chip size ( 5mm x 5mm).

Project ended 08/22/2022