Print your own chip in just six weeks: UBC offers first-ever 100% online photonics course

We are on the cusp of revolutionary changes in communication and microsystems technology. Engineers are bringing together photonics (manipulation of information using photons) and electronics (information processing using electrons) on a single platform (silicon). Electronic–photonic circuits will have a huge impact on high-speed communications for mobile devices, optical communications inside computers and in data centres, sensor systems, and medical applications.

Professor Lukas Chrostowski is offering a six-week online course for students and industry professionals to learn how to design integrated optical devices and circuits, using a hands-on approach with commercial tools. This is the world’s first online course to include photonics fabrication, experimentation, and data analysis. The students get to build their own photonics chip.

ECE: One of the most remarkable things about this course is that you can take your students from design to fabrication and testing in just six weeks. How do you get chips made and tested so quickly?

LC: We have been developing the experimental capabilities to enable this since 2007.  There has been quite a bit of investment into Silicon Photonics recently. The Canadian government has been a major supporter of these initiatives, particularly on the research training side. The Silicon Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits program at UBC is supported by a 1.65M NSERC Create grant. CMC Microsystems has been instrumental to providing access to manufacturing.  In the US, President Obama has announced a $200M investment in the technology that will help business and academia work closely together.  This level of investment means we have the expertise and the facilities ready-to-go.

ECE: Where are the chips made?

LC: Richard Bojko at the University of Washington makes the chips in the Nanofabrication Facility. We fabricate students designs using a state-of-the-art ($5M) silicon photonic rapid-prototyping 100 keV electron-beam lithography.

The measurements are performed by my team at The University of British Columbia. We measure the students’ designs using an automated optical probe station. From that point the students can analyze their experimental data.

ECE: What kind of chips are the students designing?

LC: First-time designers will design an interferometer, a widely used device in many communications and sensing applications. For advanced designers the area of design is really open to the students’interests. This course is an opportunity to design many other devices, such as directional couplers, Bragg gratings or novel waveguides, etc.

The course is flexible and hands-on enough to provide a meaningful challenge to professionals as well as students who come in with a background in conventional optics.

ECE: What potential do you see for this technology?

LC: Silicon photonics aims to integrate optics on a chip manufactured by a CMOS foundry. The concept is to replace bulk optics like lenses, and put thousands of components on a single chip. Silicon photonics has the potential to radically change the landscape of photonics. Its compatibility with well-known and mature CMOS fabrication technology offers advantages, such as low-cost, high-volume and reliable manufacturing with nanoscale precision. Integration with CMOS-based electronics allows for adding the driver and control electronics on the same chip, greatly reducing packaging complexity and cost this has been demonstrated by IBM and commercialized by Luxtera. Not only that, the addition of a photonic layer and interconnects hold the promise of solving speed bottlenecks in future computing and chip platforms.

Lukas Chrostowski is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Chrostowski received the UBC Killam Teaching Prize in 2014. He is co-author of Silicon Photonics Design, published in 2015. Prof. Chrostowski is the Program Director of the NSERC CREATE Silicon Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits (Si-EPIC) training program in Canada, and has been teaching silicon photonics workshops and courses since 2007.

Find out more about Prof. Chrostowski’s course, Silicon Photonics Design, Fabrication and Data Analysis.