About the project
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship to be undertaken within the silicon photonics group at the University of Southampton. The successful applicants will join a world leading research group of more than 50 postgraduate students and researchers working on silicon photonics technologies and photonic interconnects technologies in close collaboration with academia and industry. The project will be undertaken as part of a €10M research effort ongoing within the Horizon 2020 European project Plasmoniac and a new Horizon Europe EU project Charioteer
The project is tackling a major technological roadblock associated to silicon photonics circuits and aims to demonstrate photonic memories based on CMOS photonic waveguiding structures. The potential breakthrough derived from these components will enable the development of innovative reconfigurable photonic circuits in applications such as artificial intelligence (in particular neuromorphic) and non-volatile photonic switches. The student will work alongside research assistants industrial partners, national and international collaborators to develop innovative integrated photonics circuits.
We are looking for an enthusiastic candidate with background in photonics, electronics, physics or material science to participate to the development of non-volatile photonic memories. The work will focus on device simulation and design followed by process development and fabrication using the best University clean room facility in the UK (). Device characterisation will be performed in our state-of-the-art silicon photonics laboratory and in collaboration with our academic partners.
The Zepler Institute PhD comprises a solid education for a research career. The structured first year involves attending our training programme running in parallel with carrying out your research project. This provides a smooth transition from your degree course towards the more open-ended research that takes place in the following years under the guidance of your supervisors. We expect the vast majority of our students to present their work at international conferences and to write papers in leading academic journals as their research progresses. Students will emerge from the PhD with skills at the forefront of future photonics and semiconductor research and will benefit from many opportunities to interact with the wider community of PhD students across the Southampton Campus.
The Zepler Institute is the leading photonics and nanoelectronics research institute in the UK and possibly in Europe. 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 among the top institutes worldwide.
