Silicon Photonics Design, Fabrication and Data Analysis

This short course teaches students and industry professionals how to design integrated optical devices and circuits, using a hands-on approach with commercial tools. We will fabricate your designs using a state-of-the-art ($5M) silicon photonic rapid-prototyping 100 keV electron-beam lithography facility. We will measure your designs using an automated optical probe station and provide you the data. You will then analyze your experimental data.

Why take this course?

To get hands on design experience with integrated optics

To learn how to use advanced optical design tools

To get your design fabricated, and obtain experimental data

The focus of this course is a design project, guided by lectures, tutorials and activities. As a first-time designer, you will design an interferometer, which is a widely used device in many applications such as communications (modulation, switching) and sensing. Specifically, it is Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, consisting of fibre grating couplers, two splitters, and optical waveguides. For advanced designers, this course is an opportunity to design many other devices, such as directional couplers, ring, racetrack and disk resonators, Bragg gratings including grating assisted contra-directional couplers, photonic crystals, multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers, polarization diversity components, mode-division multiplexing (MDM) components and circuits, novel waveguides such as sub-wavelength grating (SWG) and metamaterial waveguides, slot waveguides, etc.

Commercial software tool licenses are provided in this course (Lumerical Solutions and MATLAB). Open-source alternatives are provided.

You will earn a professional certificate from the University of British Columbia and edX upon successful completion of this course. Certificates can be uploaded directly to your LinkedIn profile.

What you'll learn

• Optical modelling tools
• Mask layout tools
• Design of optical devices and circuits
• Data analysis techniques