Optics &
Photonics
Ultrasensitive
Instrument
Design
Analog Electronics
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Some of Our Current and Recent Work
Complete instrument designs, feasibility calculations, expert witness cases.... This one is a partially-completed design for a wideband current-sensitive preamp capable of measuring 1 nA in a 100-MHz bandwidth, with shot-noise limited performance. (1 nA for 10 ns is 62 electrons.) |
A volume in the
Wiley Series In Pure And Applied Optics: Second Edition, July
2009:
Now a new laboratory bible for optics researchers has joined the list; it is Phil Hobbs' Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work, aimed at providing "accessible presentation of the practical lore of electro-optical instrument design and construction." I predict it will move to the front of the shelf.
This is a wonderfully practical book.... [It] is also a wonderfully entertaining read....
Prof. A. E. Siegman, Optics & Photonics News
I like this guy's attitude. He points out how most scholars...never write about the troubles they had getting the apparatus to work right, or the changes they had to make to get valid data. Mr. Hobbs talks about exactly that. Good man. ...[I]f you work in this field, you ought to buy this book. If you don't work in this field, then you should still read it.A look inside:
Bob Pease, Electronic Design
Antenna-Coupled Tunnel Junctions for Optical Interconnection(Click on image at right for larger version.)My silicon photonics work at IBM centred on the idea of integrating submicron silicon optical waveguides with metal plasmonic antennas and metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel junctions, to build optical detectors and modulators in the 1.55 μm region. They use a novel plasmonic travelling-wave structure to eliminate the effects of capacitance at optical frequenciesit's the fat metal bit in the middle of the X-shaped antenna arms, shown in the figure at right. The attraction of this method is that it potentially eliminates the usual drawbacks of silicon photonic switching devices: narrow optical bandwidth, extreme temperature sensitivity, and high drive power. We estimated that it could reach drive power levels of less than 40 microwatts per Gb/s (40 fJ/bit), due to its low voltage swing (100 mV) and sub-femtofarad capacitance. This is the project that POEMS was written for. We demonstrated the first waveguide-integrated ACTJ detectors, which have achieved a 40-fold increase in both response and sensitivity over any previous ACTJ detector. We built all our own waveguide wafers as well as the ACTJ devices on top The details of the junctions and fabrication procedures are here. In the second half of 2010, I did some more work on these devices with an aerospace client, for use as infrared pixels, and I expect more uses to develop. |
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Particles in plasma etch chambers are a major source of yield loss
in semiconductor manufacturing. Particles condensing from
the plasma or spalling out of films on the chamber walls are
levitated in the edges of the plasma sheath for long periods, and
then (too often) drop on the wafer when the plasma excitation is
turned off.