Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Ming C. Wu

BPN609: Ultra-Sensitive Photodetectors on Silicon Photonics

Ryan Going
Tae Joon Seok
2015

As CMOS devices shrink in physical size, electrical interconnects between the devices will consume an ever-greater proportion of total chip power. A promising solution is to use silicon photonics for intra- and inter-chip communications. To be cost effective, both the optical transmitter and receiver should be made small, highly efficient, and CMOS compatible. Shrinking the photodiode will increase sensitivity and energy efficiency, but as it gets very small, the capacitance of the wire to the first amplifying stage in the receiver becomes significant. We present a solution which...

BPN676: Q-Boosted Optomechanical Oscillators

Turker Beyazoglu
Tristan Rocheleau
2015

This project aims to demonstrate Radiation Pressure driven Optomechanical Oscillators (RP-OMOs) with low phase noise and low power operation suitable for various applications in optical and RF communications. In particular, chip scale atomic clocks with low power consumption can be realized by replacing its power-hungry quartz-based microwave synthesizer with the proposed RP-OMO structure. The Q-boosted RP-OMO design approach of this work makes it possible to optimize both optical and mechanical design to simultaneously reduce the phase noise and threshold power of these oscillators...

BPN820: Multicast Silicon Photonic MEMS Switches

Sangyoon Han
Tae Joon Seok
2016

Silicon photonic switches have been developed for fast and low-cost optical switching. However most of demonstration is still limited in unicast operation. In this project, we develop a silicon photonic switch that is capable of multicast switching. We have implemented silicon photonic switches with movable waveguide couplers that can control power splitting ratio precisely. The switch has 4x20 ports, fast switching time (<9.6 us), low optical insertion loss (<4.0 dB), and small footprint (1.2 mm x 4.5 mm). We have demonstrated 1- to-2 and 1-to-4 multicast operation with the...

BPN798: Hyper Wideband-Enabled RF Messaging (HERMES)

TBD
2016

The goal of the hyper-wideband enabled RF messaging (HERMES) project is to investigate advanced micro- systems and techniques for jam-resistant radio frequency (RF) communications. Hyper wideband (HWB) code division multiple access (CDMA) offers many unprecedented benefits for RF communications, including robust resistance to jamming and inference signals, and large coding gain for high data rate communications. Current challenges with implementing such HWB CDMA are the complexity and high power consumption of electrically based systems, particularly the receivers that are suitable...

BPN665: Frequency Modulated Laser Source for 3D Imaging

Phillip Sandborn
2016

In recent years we have seen a growing demand for 3D cameras for applications such as gaming, entertainment, and autonomous vehicles. Present solutions suffer from high power dissipation and large size. This project leverages heterogeneous integration of standard CMOS electronics with high performance optical components including lasers, photo-diodes, interferometers and waveguides to reduce size, cost, and power dissipation.

Project end date: 08/25/16

BPN825: Direct On-Chip Digital Optical Synthesizer (DODOS)

Jean-Etienne Tremblay
Guan-Lin Su
Kyungmok Kwon
2018

The advent of precise microwave frequency synthesis in the 1940’s enabled a disruptive revolution in the capabilities enabled by microwave technology, including wireless and wireline communications, RADAR, electronic warfare, and atomic sensors and timing technology. It is envisioned that the DODOS program will advance a similar transformative revolution based on ubiquitous optical frequency synthesis technology. Laboratory-scale optical frequency synthesis was successfully realized in 1999 with the invention of self-referenced optical frequency combs based on femto-second pulse-...

BPN458: Optical Antenna-Based nanoLED

Kevin Han
Seth Fortuna
Matin Amani
2019

Spontaneous emission has been considered slower and weaker than stimulated emission. As a result, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have only been used in applications with bandwidth 1 GHz. Spontaneous emission is inefficient because the radiating dipole is much smaller than the wavelength and such short dipoles are poor radiators. By attaching an optical antenna to the radiating dipole at the nanoscale, the emission rate can be significantly increased, enabling high modulation bandwidths theoretically 100 GHz. This project focuses on the physical demonstration of this new type of...

BPN788: MEMS-Actuated Grating-Based Optical Phased Array for LIDAR

Xiaosheng Zhang
2019

Optical phased array (OPA) devices that uses diffraction to steer an optical beam have found applications ranging from light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical (FSO) communications, optical switches, holographic display, biomedical imaging, etc. We aim to integrate the OPA system into the application of automobile navigation, which is currently primarily dominated by opto-mechanical scanning based systems, which are usually bulky and relatively slow thus cannot provide the steering speeds and versatility necessary for many applications. Traditional OPAs are usually...

BPN856: Broadly-Tunable Laser with Self-Imaging Three-Branch Multi-Mode Interferometer

Guan-Lin Su
2019

Tunable lasers with high side-mode suppression ratios (SMSRs) are cost-effective solutions to replace multiple DFB lasers in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems. Two arm interference-based devices, such as C3- and Y-branch lasers, have advantages over grating- and ring-resonator-based counterparts in terms of cost and fabrication complexities; however, it is fundamentally difficult to achieve high SMSRs and wide tuning ranges simultaneously. In our proposed...

Silicon Photonic Devices for Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits

Ming-Chun Tien
Ming C. Wu
Constance Chang-Hasnain
Xiang Zhang
2009
Electronic and photonic integrated circuits use optics to overcome bottlenecks of microelectronics in bandwidth and power consumption. Silicon photonic devices such as optical modulators, filters, switches, and photodetectors have being developed for integration with electronics based on existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. An important building block of photonic devices is the optical ...