Waveguide Testing
EE40468 / EE50568 Photonics Lab
Initiated under a 1992 $90K grant from the National Science Foundation for the development of a "Model Undergraduate Integrated Optics Laboratory," direction of what is now the Photonics Laboratory course (EE 40468/EE60568, Enrollment Information, Course Syllabus and Schedule) in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame was transferred in 1995 to Professor Douglas Hall who has worked since to define and further develop both classroom and laboratory content. In 1997, the laboratory was renovated and expanded from 312 sq. ft. and 1 optical table to 634 sq. ft., now housing 3 optical tables and several smaller lab benches and optical breadboards. Through 11 semester terms of EE 468, the only photonics course in the College of Engineering, nearly 120 undergraduate and graduate students from electrical engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering, and physics have been educated in the fundamentals of photonics. With weekly hands-on lab experiments and twice-weekly lectures, this 3 credit hour elective course provides a broad overview of the important role of photons alongside electrons in modern electrical engineering. Photonics concepts and technologies studied include basic wave and electromagnetic optics, Gaussian beams, interferometry, resonators, lasers, Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), coherence, spectroscopy, dielectric waveguides and integrated optics, optical fibers and fiber communications, holography, optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices, polarization, and electro-optic and liquid crystal modulators.
In addition to 10 weeks of laboratory projects, students spend at least 4 weeks working on advanced open-ended special projects which have recently included fabrication and characterization of working visible quantum-well heterostructure diode lasers, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguides and arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs, used for wavelength division multiplexing), Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, and holograms. Other special projects have involved evaluation of pre-commercial prototypes of components obtained both from industry contacts and through the Photonics Technology Access Program (PTAP) of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA), including Molex Gigabit Ethernet optical transceiver modules, Emcore vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) devices, Nortel fiber-coupled opto-electronic micro-electro-mechanical structure (OE-MEMS) based C-band tunable filters and resonators, and Agility sampled-grating distributed feedback tunable C-band telecommunications lasers. These very successful projects end with a class presentation and demonstration, and have exposed the students to the latest important photonics technologies.
Demonstrating a high level of synergism and integration of both photonics teaching and research, advanced equipment purchased through research grants has been utilized in the course, other equipment and software costs have been shared between research grants and teaching funds available from the college, and advanced graduate research assistants have contributed to the operation of the teaching laboratory and direction of special projects. The development of SOI waveguides for educational projects has been partly funded through recent NSF research grants and has formed the basis for 2 Masters theses and 2 undergraduate research projects. Of special note, one of the latter by Mr. Dane Wheeler, "Design and Fabrication of Optical Logic Gates in Silicon," received the First Place Prize in the national 2003 Intel Student Research Contest (Santa Clara, CA, April 2003).