Research
Photonic Integrated Circuit (Coming Soon)
Optoelectronics
Electrical-driven plasmon source on silicon based on quantum tunneling
A silicon-based light source presents an unreached goal in the field of photonics due to silicon’s indirect electronic band structure preventing direct carrier recombination and subsequent photon emission. Here, we utilize inelastically tunneling electrons to demonstrate an electrically driven light emitting silicon-based tunnel junction operating at room temperature. By coupling an internal electric field enhancement with an external k-vector matching grating, we were able to demonstrate a 10-fold increase in the internal efficiency and a 40-fold increase in overall quantum efficiency.
Tunable Optic Antenna for Internet of Things (IOT) Applications
Current communication and sensing systems are both bulky and has many limitations. In addition, high bandwidth short range communication offers many advantages for IOT applications including interaction between human body, cars, drones, etc. A new approach is required to not only minimize the system while keeping very high frequency with wide bandwidth but also decrease the required power consumption. Here the proposed devices can enable wide range frequency tuning with low power consumption for adoptable IOT system.
Reliable Brillouin Amplification for Optic Systems
Brillouin fiber amplifier (BFA) configuration has been implemented and important in a wide range of applications, such as microwave photonics shape-adjustable narrowband optical filtering, radio-over-fiber technology, generation of millimeter-wave signals, exploiting as tunable slow-light delay buffers and fiber optic sensing. We report on an accurate closed-form analytical model for the gain of a Brillouin fiber amplifier that accounts for material loss in the depleted pump regime
MEMS / NEMS
Filters
CMOS-MEMS Wide Range Tunable Resonator/Filter for Wireless Communication
MEMS resonators cover a wide range of applications, such as oscillators, gyroscopes, biosensors, and gas sensors. Two resonators, consisting of multiple metal, dielectric layers, and poly1 layers, were designed; the first resonator at 303.4 kHz, while the second at 2053 kHz, achieve the frequency tuning ranges of 35.7%–42.6%, respectively. A power consumption of 900 μW/beam is achieved.
Sensors
Highly Sensitive CMOS-MEMS Temperature Sensor for Internet of Things (IOT) and Thermal Cameras
Microbolometers and photon detectors are two main technologies to address the needs in Infrared Sensing applications. While the microbolometers in both complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology offer many advantages over photon detectors. A 31x improvement in the temperature sensitivity is achieved in this project.
Portable Highly Sensitive Biosensor
Monitoring glucose, blood pressure, sodium, cholesterol, and the detection of infectious pathogens are just a few of the functionalities of biosensors. The potential for rapid and early diagnosis is creating demand for high sensitivity, portability, and even smartphone adaptability that can reduce morbidity and mortality of patients through early detection by alerting doctors and patients to pertinent, laboratory quality results. While there is a migration in the industry to design consumer-based devices, the current point-of care devices are limited in sensitivity and detection time. Here up to 46 times improvement in frequency shift with respect to the first mode was demonstrated by the FEM when a 1 pg mass was attached to the MEMS filter. This promising result would provide a much more sensitive biosensor when combined with the higher mode reading capability of the LDV.
VLSI and ASIC
