Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MIRIPSHE (MID-IR Integrated Photonic Sensor for Health and Environment)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-01-01 al 2017-12-31
The materials platform developed in MIRIPSHE would accelerate the monolithic integration of MIR photonic circuitries with the present state of the art CMOS systems. This manufacturing compatible process produced under MIRIPSHE will be easily adopted by the CMOS industries and enable the low-cost production of MIR sensors for health and environmental monitoring thereby helping society and boosting the economy. These novel materials will appeal to multi-disciplinary researchers engaged in biophotonics, medical devices and smart system development, for creating fast, precise and customer-friendly devices for sensing and diagnosis. Furthermore, the material engineering and integration process would unlock a creative and high impact research area, prospering beyond the optical interconnect technology and succeeding in the seamless integration of multiple functions (mechanical, electrical, acoustic and imaging) on a single chip, leading to the invention of more sophisticated systems that have ever been seen before.
An innovative method to realise selective doping for an optical waveguide formation using shadow masking technique have tried and the direct transfer of straight channel patterns are accomplished. Also, direct etching of the silica on silicon substrates to formulate the waveguides are also achieved. Compared to the shadow masking technique, the direct etching gives precise waveguide dimensions while it is an expensive manufacturing technique. Shadow masking is low cost and also provide the versatility of selective doping.
Once an optimised patterning method and precise dimensions are obtained, this method can be further extended to realise more complicated optical nanostructures and sensor heads on silicon and silicon compounds.
Overall the preliminary results obtained under MIRIPSHE are encouraging to continue this research to develop CMOS-mid-IR photonic circuits for sensing and other applications. More time and resources are really needed to drive this research and realise the full potential of the new material engineering process and device developmental activities.
The in-situ high-temperature structural studies were published in Elsevier journal Scripta Materialia (Chandrappan, J.; Khetan,V;Murray, M.;Ward,M; Jose, G. Devitrification of ultrafast laser plasma produced glass layer. Scripta Materialia 2017,131,37-41) and a second journal paper manuscript ""Direct integration of GaLaS on silicon "" is under preparation.
The fellow has submitted an EPSRC early career fellowship application based on the initial results to advance this research and extend the integration technique to other material families including group -IV and compound semiconductors such as Ge and Sn. In this research, the fellow has proposed an international research collaboration with the University of Southampton, UK; Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary; University of Stuttgart, Germany. In addition, Xterra communications, a leader in optical component and underwater communication sector, is also partnered in this research.
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