Research project: Design, development and test of photonic integrated circuits

Photonic integrated circuits (PIC) are a disruptive technology that has been accelerating over the past few years driven by data and telecommunication applications such as the proliferation of massive data centres and 5G rollouts. Often compared to the revolutionary implementation of the electronic microprocessor, PICs are directly integrating discrete photonic, opto-electronic and electronic devices together to achieve greater performance, lower costs and are finding other use cases such as in medical, sensing and artificial intelligence applications. Due to the diverse materials and fabrication process employed in fabricating photonic and opto-electronic devices, the challenges of PICs are in the fabrication technologies required for integration, packaging of these PICs and test and characterization in order to reduce test costs and improve yields. The development of novel fabrication process for integrating photonic circuits will be the main aim of this project coupled with design-for-test methodologies to enable wafer level testing of PICs.