Are you seeking a comprehensive and yet succinct introduction to silicon-based integrated photonics? Do you want to promptly acquire a common lexicon and technical perspective to help you begin to envision new application-specific systems components, that can leverage the unique optical functions of integrated photonics?
Welcome to Fundamentals of Integrated Photonics: a self-paced, modular gateway course that upskills you in the foundational principles of silicon-based materials and devices, and in integration design strategies for planar photonics links.
Silicon-based integrated photonics is a modern engineering technology that caps thirty-plus years of research and development, into hybridizing the information-relay capacity of optical fiber telecommunications, with the processing infrastructure of microelectronics. While the early days of silicon photonics presumed this synergy to enable ever-higher computational performance for microprocessors, the last two decades have begun to open up transformative new opportunities for it in cloud computing datacom, microwave and millimeter-through terahertz wireless, chemical and biological sensing, augmented imaging, and quantum computing area applications—in addition to next-generation telecom.
This course introduces you to the prerequisite optical design insights and skills to evaluate a communications or sensing optical link. You’ll be introduced to
- emerging applications area drivers and criteria to assess the endorsement of integrated photonics solutions;
- electromagnetism modeling of silicon photonic materials (silicon, silicon oxide, silicon nitride, germanium) and optical waveguide confinement;
- a toolkit of integration principles and an express survey of key passive and active device components; and
- performance metrics for an optical link.
Completion of the course equips you with a professional engineer-level competency to participate actively in team-consensus design of application-specific integrated photonics solutions. Incipient or veteran engineers in electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering-affiliated industries such as telecom, microelectronics, wireless, gas and medical sensing, or optical ranging will benefit from this course as a primer or refresher on modern photonics. Course completion also prepares you for more advanced online courses or specialty conference short courses in application-area systems design, passive or active device modeling, or photonic circuit simulation and layout (see edX course Photonic Integrated Circuits 1).
What you'll learn
- 21st century application systems driver for photonics adoption and technology innovation opportunities.
- Materials properties and processing of silicon or silicon nitride photonic devices; linear versus non-linear photonics materials.
- The one-dimensional Helmholtz equation and Finite Difference Method; polarization dependent two-dimensional optical confinement principles.
- A toolkit of photonics integration principles.
- Dispersion versus loss-limited optical link design.