Short Courses

SC292 Planar Integrated Optics

Sunday, February 24, 4:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Christopher R. Doerr; Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, USA

Level: Beginner (No background or minimal training is necessary to understand course material)

Course Description
This course will discuss planar lightwave circuits (PLCs), focusing on applications for optical communications. It will cover various material platforms, including silica, silicon, polymer and InP. The course will start with optical waveguide fundamentals and move progressively toward more complicated state-of-the-art devices. Many examples of commercially available devices will be presented and explained.

Benefits and Learning Objectives
This course should enable you to:

• Design optical waveguide structures.
• Simulate optical waveguide structures.
• Design planar lightwave circuits.
• Simulate planar lightwave circuits.
• Understand different material systems strengths and weaknesses.
• Design electronics for driving planar lightwave circuits.
• Predict future abilities and costs of planar lightwave circuits.
• Debug problems in planar lightwave circuits.

Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who has a basic optics knowledge but wants to learn more about integrated optics.

Instructor Biography
Christopher R. Doerr earned a bachelor's degree in aeronautical/astronautical engineering and a bachelor's, master's and doctorate (1995) in electrical engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He attended MIT on an Air Force ROTC scholarship and earned his pilot wings at Williams AFB, Ariz., in 1991. His doctoral thesis, on constructing a fiber-optic gyroscope with noise below the quantum limit, was supervised by Prof. Hermann Haus. Since coming to Bell Labs in 1995, Doerr’s research has focused on integrated devices for optical communication. He was promoted to distinguished member of technical staff in 2000 and received the OSA Engineering Excellence Award in 2002. Doerr is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, is an elected member of the LEOS Board of Governors, was a subcommittee chair for OFC 2005, and was on the committee for ECOC 2006 and 2007. He became an IEEE Fellow in 2007.