Postdoc Crosstalk in integrated photonic multi-channel transceivers

After the age of steam (19th century) and the age of electronics (20th century) the 21st century is becoming the age of photonics. Lasers for all kinds of applications, solar cells, LED lighting, displays and many other photonic devices are already exceeding the market for microelectronics and growing faster.

Photonic Integration

The breakthrough of electronics to all domains of our society has been enabled by microelectronic integration technology, which enables low-cost integration of large circuits and systems on a single chip. Photonic Integration is still in its infancy, but rapidly gaining importance. Europe is leading a novel approach based on advanced multifunctional integration technology that supports a broad range of different applications. It will lead to a dramatic reduction of the costs of Photonic ICs which will bring them within reach for many high-tech SMEs1.

TU/e Photonic Integration group

Our Photonic Integration group is playing a key role in this exciting development and it is searching for PhD students and postdocs that want to help us in pushing the frontiers of integration technology and chip complexity to their fundamental limits. We offer excellent opportunities for research into increasingly complex Photonic ICs and for advanced material, technology and device research for development of a next technology generation with strongly improved performance and new capabilities2.

1) Small and Medium Enterprise

2) M. Smit, J. van der Tol and M. Hill, “Moore’s law in Photonics”, will be published in Laser and Photonics Review, July 2011 (jeppix.eu/papers/Smit_2011_PRL.pdf)

More information about the research group you can find here: http://www.tue.nl/universiteit/faculteiten/electrical-engineering/onderzoek/onderzoeksprogrammas/opto-electronic-devices-oed/

Project Description:

Parallelism is a generic answer to the demand for ever increasing data transmission capacity, both on short and longer distances. It requires multichannel transmitters and receivers. Multi-channel transceivers are ideal candidates for photonic integration, because the additional channels come at very small additional costs. A major challenge is in keeping the inter-channel crosstalk sufficiently low. Crosstalk will occur because of RF, optical and thermal coupling between different channels and will be most prominent between adjacent channels with close physical and wavelength spacing.