About the project
This project seeks to develop a simple, low-cost laser materials processing procedure to fabricate high-quality polysilicon photonic platforms that will ease issues associated with optoelectronic integration.
Silicon materials are synonymous with the microelectronics industry and, in particular, the processors used in everyday gadgets such as mobile phones, tablets, digital radios and televisions. More recently, due to its favourable optical properties, silicon has gained popularity in the field of optical information technologies, i.e., using photons instead of electrons to transfer information.
Bringing these two research areas together on an integrated platform will have huge technological consequences. However, there is a challenge: silicon photonic devices are typically fabricated via complex processing of expensive single crystal wafers, which renders multi-device integration difficult.
The work will have elements of materials deposition, device fabrication, and optical characterization of components such as couplers, resonators, and modulators. It will also be possible to extend this work to other semiconductor materials, including silicon-germanium alloys where laser processing can be used to locally control the composition to tune device performance.
The role will be integrated within our team of dynamic and skilled researchers.
There will be opportunities to interact with our academic and industrial partners across the UK and internationally.
The Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) is the leading photonics research institute in the UK. It comprises state-of-the-art cleanrooms for optical fibre, planar photonics, silicon and bio-photonics fabrication and over 80 laboratories. Computer simulations will benefit from Southampton’s high performance computing cluster Iridis, one of the largest supercomputers in the UK.
A PhD at the ORC has enabled our past graduates to make successful careers in academia, in national scientific laboratories, and as scientists or business leaders in industry. Our research papers, patents, spin-off companies and these successful alumni taken together place Southampton amongst the top institutes worldwide.
