High-speed and low-power phase modulators for visible integrated photonics

Optical instrumentation has a key role in life science research and diagnostics. Optical techniques based on fluorescence, absorption, spectroscopy, microscopy etc are routinely used in the clinical practice. For reasons of performance, cost and form factor, free space optics is recently increasingly replaced by integrated photonics, which allows to integrate a wide variety of optical functionality on a small chip, lowering cost and increasing functionality per area.  Especially in fields such as DNA sequencing this has led to new breakthroughs in the application space. While both passive and active nanophotonic circuits can now be fabricated in several pilot lines, the integration of low power, and high speed phase modulators is lagging behind. This limits the expansion of the applications of integrated photonics towards e.g. high speed swept lasers for optical coherence tomography or high speed wavefront shaping for scattering compensation. In this project, the Ph.D. student will be working on integrating novel high-speed and low-power phase modulators as part of imec silicon nitride waveguide platform after deep diving into Python programming and the physics behind silicon photonics and MEMS. 

In this research, the Ph.D. student will:

• Review the existing MEMS-like modulators in literature.
• Design, simulate, layout and characterize phase modulators for visible integrated photonics with imec 200 mm silicon nitride photonics platform.
• Improve the phase modulator performances compared to state of the art by advanced optimization methods, such as classical local/global optimization methods, and black-box-like AI-driven optimization.
• Deploy the phase modulators into on-chip optical systems for visible lights, such as swept source lasers, scattering compensation using wavefront shaping, and visible beam forming.