Abstract:
Silicon has been the mainstream of electronic industry for decades. In recent times, the use of silicon for photonics application has attracted significant attention. Silicon photodiodes are common passive devices however the monolithic integration of active micorphotonics devices over a silicon chip will not only enhance the cost effectiveness through mass production but will boost the signal processing speed. The decade of 1990's was dictated by the development of high performance on-chip passive photonics components like couplers, junctions, multiplexers etc. which are now available commercially. The focus at present is on the development of active photonics devices which in silicon is quite a challenging task. In the last couple of years though, significant breakthroughs have been achieved in the development of silicon based modulators, switches, amplifiers, lasers, detectors and wavelength converters. However the performance of these on-chip silicon active devices are still below par compared to their non-silicon counterparts.
The aim of this project is to propose and demonstrate coupled electro-optical modeling of active silicon on insulator based photonic devices. For applications which are primarily based on linear refractive index of silicon such as phase modulation coupled electro-optical modeling can also be performed using commercially available numerical packages like FEMLAB. The approach used in these software is to discretize the solution domain and obtain the solution in 2-D or 3-D with appropriate boundary conditions. This proceduregive quite accurate results but is computationally intensive and time consuming. An approximate but quick solution procedure will be developed for modeling phase modulators. On the other hand for applications involving nonlinear refractive index of silicon such as Raman amplification and wavelength conversion, modeling of only optical part is performed similar to optical fibers and the influence of electronics is either completely missed out or is partly modeled separately. A new approach for Coupled electro-optical modeling of Raman amplification and wavelength conversion will be developed and demonstrated.
About the Speaker:
Aashish Singh obtained his BE degree from Agra University and Masters in Engineering degree from Panjab University, India, both in electronics & Communication Engineering, In 2001 and 2004 respectively.
From 2004-2006 he worked as project associate at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-Delhi), before joining Monash university to pursue Master of Engineering Science by research leading to PhD in August 2006.
