Fundamentals of Integrated Photonics

Are you an engineering student or early- to mid-career engineer, in a specialty area that is rapidly adopting optical and photonics-based materials or device designs, to create innovative systems solutions for modern high tech applications?

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).

Image courtesy S.F. Preble, Rochester Institute of Technology. AIM Photonics Academy education chip layout designed by Rochester Institute of Technology, Boston University, and University of Rochester.