CHIP-SCALE PHOTONICS TESTING FACILITY AT UCSD
The Chip-scale Photonics Testing Facility (http://sdni.ucsd.edu/chip-scale-photonics.php) is the
San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure (SDNI) branch of the National Science Foundation (NSF)
National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) initiative.
The facility is a general purpose optics and photonics research laboratory. It is furnished with state
of the art test equipment that can accommodate both integrated and free space experiments.
CIAN’s purpose is to foster the development of transformative technologies for optical networks.
With this goal in mind, the facility enables novel research on photonic networking architectures,
optical switching technology, and the integration and miniaturization of electronic and photonic
technology.
Applications
Photonics research has gained attention recently and
UCSD is making high impact. Specifically, experimental
work demonstrating a mechanism to realize space-
division multiplexing on an integrated chip, as well as
a suitable network architecture [1]. This technology
has the potential to provide cost and complexity
savings. The testing facility at UCSD has also done work
demonstrating and characterizing the capacitively
driven free-carrier effect in SOI waveguides [2]. In the
future this technology will form the basis of extremely
efficient optical switches and modulators.
Many of these photonics tools and infrastructure are in
the early stages of development. As the development
continues increasingly complex and sophisticated
devices will be created and a much higher degree of
photonics integration produced. For networks this will
provide ever greater cost and complexity savings and
improved efficiency.
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CIAN / Center for Integrated Access Networks