Co-sponsored by: IEEE Montreal/ MTT Montreal / Polygrames/STARaCom

The ability to use electromagnetic waves to interact with the physical world and extract information from observable changes constitute one of the canonical representations of sensing. Our ability to accomplish such complex tasks in chip-scale platforms has, so far, been limited to very small and distinct regions of the spectrum, primarily limited by the underlying device technology. In the next few decades, there is need to expand this spectral access across orders of magnitude higher span than ever before, to foster a future class of connected sensory technologies, that can not only allow us to monitor the physical world down from the molecular level to environmental level, but also learn, make intelligent decisions and perform autonomous actuation functions.

In this talk, I will highlight our approaches to process electromagnetic fields in silicon based chip-scale systems across two very different and highly application-rich wavelength regimes: Terahertz and visible-range/near-IR optical frequencies. Visible range is a dominant spectral region in bio-medical analysis ranging from analysis of complex bio-molecular and cell interactions to diagnostics and drug testing with fluorescence reporters, but these instruments are typically bulky, expensive and limited to centralized laboratories. In the first part of the talk, I will highlight our approaches to completely eliminate all external optics and radically miniaturize them through co-integration of complex, multi-functional and massively scalable nano-optical structures and embedded electronics to enable a new class of mm-scale, chip-sized optical sensors. In the second part of the talk, I will highlight our approaches in the longer wavelengths at mm-Wave and THz frequencies and describe how we exploit sensing and manipulation (also at sub-wavelength scales) to incorporate programmability and universality, critical for future communication and sensing.

Speaker(s): Pr. Kaushik Sengupta,

Location:
Room: A621
Bldg: Main Building (1A)
Polytechnique Montréal
2900 Boulevard Edouard-Montpetit
Montreal, Quebec
H3T 1J4