Short period tilted gratings in conventional optical fibers provide a myriad of novel sensing mechanisms and modalities. These devices are very easy to fabricate and do not require physical modification of the fiber geometry. We use the core mode back reflection as a power and wavelength reference in order to monitor the reactions of selected cladding mode resonances to various perturbations with great accuracy. Experimental results on temperature-independent strain sensing, bending, and refractive index will be presented, as well as a new configuration that allows the excitation of surface plasmon resonances for bio-chemical sensing. Finally, photonic chip designs for interrogating these sensors efficiently will be presented and discussed.

Rare-earth doped silicon oxide structures are of great interest in optoelectronics and are widely employed in amplifiers and solid state light sources. Emphasis is placed on Erbium-doped materials, as it is of importance in telecommunications, but a range of other rare-earth ions are also studied. We use electron-cyclotron-resonance plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (ECR-PECVD) to fabricate rare-earth doped silicon oxide thin films. The low temperature and room temperature properties of rare-earth optical emission were analyzed by photoluminescence (PL) measurements. The emission intensity of the thin films can be optimized by varying the film composition and post-deposition thermal treatments. The possible design and processing of Er:SRSO planar waveguide amplifiers and Er:SRSO LEDs will also be discussed.

SOI planar optical waveguide technology offers great promise for monolithic integration of optical and electronic functions on the same silicon chip. The technology is finding application in optical telecommunications, optical interconnect in microelectronics, and in biophotonic sensing. This talk focuses on recent work at Carleton aimed at realizing the promise of optical and electronic integration on the SOI platform. Specifically, CMOS device isolation structures are being exploited to form optical waveguides, easing the integration of CMOS electronics with optical components. Application to an optical power leveler will be discussed and ongoing work on evanescent field sensors reviewed.

On-die optics have been proposed for imaging, spectral analysis, and communications applications. These systems typically require extra process steps to fabricate on-die optics. Fabrication of diffractive optics using the metal layers in commercial CMOS processes circumvents this requirement, allowing inexpensive fabrication of integrated sensors, and an implementation in 0.18 micron CMOS is described. The diffractive optics used suffer from blurring and chromatic aberration. These aberrations can be greatly reduced via image post-processing, using approaches based on Wiener deconvolution filtering. Simulations indicate that the resulting systems can resolve point source spectral features with a resolution of 25 nm and determine position to within 0.05 radian, and resolve features 0.3 radian in size in images illuminated by white light, with further improvement possible.

In radio over fiber systems, a highly linear optical transmitter is necessary to achieve the required signal dynamic range. In order to compensate for second and third order laser distortions, quadratic and cubic law circuits are usually required to work at up to 2 or 3 times the carrier frequency due to the need to accommodate harmonic frequencies. This research proposal proposes an alternative design approach that uses a multi-tank technique to relieve the bandwidth requirement of the predistortion circuits at the same time providing tunability to account for component variation, thermal effect and aging of semiconductor lasers. An integrated laser pre-distorter that works up to approximately 2GHz with about 300MHz bandwidth was designed using 0.13 micron CMOS technology. Reductions of 20-30dB for the 2nd and 3rd order harmonic distortion were obtained in simulation.