Wei Du
University of Arkansas, AR·Engineering
Wireless systems such as 5G, radar and satellite links must move ever more data. One approach is to handle radio signals with light instead of electronics, called microwave photonics.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
integrated microwave photonics
silicon photonics
sapphire substrate
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Grow high-performance III-V semiconductor lasers on sapphire substrates by developing wafer-to-wafer covalent bonding, which joins two wafers with chemical bonds.
- Develop low-loss straight and bent waveguides, channels that carry light on a chip, using a newly designed silicon nitride-on-sapphire technology.
- Build passive optical building blocks on sapphire, including splitters, couplers and ring resonators, toward a complete integrated microwave photonics chip.
- Grow lattice-matched Ge/SiGeSn quantum well stacks with atomically sharp interfaces and characterize their electronic properties for intersubband devices, which use electron jumps between energy levels.
- Use terahertz and far-infrared spectroscopy to demonstrate an engineered far-infrared transition and proof-of-concept intersubband photoconductivity in SiGeSn heterostructures.
More about the research
Doing this on a single small chip requires building lasers, light guides and detectors from materials that work well together. Separately, part of the infrared spectrum, the very long wavelength infrared and terahertz range, still lacks good lasers and detectors. These two projects develop new semiconductor material platforms for light-based devices: sapphire chips for integrated microwave photonics, and silicon-germanium-tin layers for far-infrared and terahertz light.
Why it matters
A single sapphire chip carrying lasers and optical parts could make radar processing, 5G and satellite communications, and medical imaging systems smaller, lighter, lower in power and cheaper to make in a foundry. SiGeSn layers could eventually lead to room-temperature terahertz lasers and sensitive far-infrared detectors for sensing, thermal imaging and spectroscopy. Because the material is compatible with silicon manufacturing, it could support US semiconductor production.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Benjamin Williams
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Engineering
Demonstrate terahertz frequency combs, lasers emitting many evenly spaced colors, from quantum-cascade vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers by developing new amplifying metasurfaces, fabrication processes and dispersion-compensation elements.
Yuping Zeng
University of Delaware, DE·Engineering·Early-career
Find the material, surface and interface causes that make GaN-on-Si high electron mobility transistors perform worse than GaN-on-SiC devices, by linking fabrication process steps to measured device performance.
Thomas Folland
University of Iowa, IA·Physics·Early-career
Demonstrate resonant coupling between surface phonon polaritons in gallium arsenide, light waves bound to crystal lattice vibrations, and intersubband transitions in quantum well photodiodes, to enhance infrared absorption and detection beyond 8 micrometers.
The school
University of Arkansas: 12 labs on PI Pages, $231M a year on research, 179 research doctorates a year.
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