Silicon Nanophotonic Devices for Optical Interconnects and Biosensing

Silicon nanomembrane based nanophotonic devices provide novel applications not only on silicon but also on a myriad of unconventional substrates such as glass, III-V compounds and PC boards. It will greatly enhance applications in communications and various sensing applications in rigid and conformable surfaces of various military and civilian platforms. In this presentation, we will present intra-chip and inter-chip optical interconnects using silicon subwavelength gratings. Unlike electrical interconnects, optical interconnects provides the possibility of having three dimensional interconnection layers with two dimensional geometry with very low crossing loss (0.02 dB/node experimentally confirmed). 2D optical beam steering with very large steering angle is demonstrated. Further applications using defect engineered photonic crystal waveguide (PCW) based slow light devices provide us with an ultra-sensitive biosensing platform for any biomarker detection. Early lung and breast cancer detection results will be presented also with high sensitivity without sacrificing specificity.
Ray T. Chen is the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair at The University of Texas Austin. Chen is the director of the Nanophotonics and Optical Interconnects Research Lab, at the Microelectronics Research Center. He is also the director of the newly formed AFOSR MURI-Center for Silicon Nanomembrane involving faculty from Stanford, UIUC, Rutgers, and UT Austin. He received his BS degree in Physics in 1980 from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, his MS degree in physics in 1983, and his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 1988, both from the University of California. He joined UT Austin in 1992 to start the optical interconnect research program. From 1988 to 1992 Chen worked as a research scientist, manager, and director of the Department of Electro-Optic Engineering at the Physical Optics Corporation in Torrance, California.
Chen served as the CTO, Founder, and Chairman of the Board of Radiant Research, Inc. from 2000 to 2001, where he raised 18 million dollars A-Round funding to commercialize polymer-based photonic devices involving over twenty patents, which were acquired by Finisar in 2002, a publicly traded company in the Silicon Valley (NASDAQ:FNSR). He also serves as the founder and Chairman of the Board of Omega Optics Inc. since its initiation in 2001. Omega Optics has received over five million dollars in research funding. His research work has been awarded over 120 research grants and contracts.
Chen's group at UT Austin has reported its research findings in more than 780 published papers, including over 90 invited papers. He holds over 25 issued patents. Chen is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, and SPIE. He was the recipient of the 1987 UC Regent's Dissertation Fellowship and the 1999 UT Engineering Foundation Faculty Award, for his contributions in research, teaching and services. He was also the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Teaching Award, and the 2010 IEEE HKN Loudest Professor Award. 2013 NASA Certified Technical Achievement Award for contribution on moon surveillance conformable phased array antenna.
Chen has supervised and graduated 45 PhD students from his research group at UT Austin.