/ News / Online Course and Teaching Modules for Photonic Integrated Circuit Design
The emerging field of integrated photonics moves beyond microelectronic circuits and optical fiber by taking advantage of the unique properties of light to create miniaturized on-chip optical circuits. Photonic integrated circuit (PIC) designers must have a firm understanding of waveguide modes to work with the micron-scale behavior of light. Learners need to move beyond ray optics to learn the basics of modal analysis and mode superposition using novel methods of 2D and 3D data visualization.
MIT has developed the Integrated Photonics Simulation Library (IPSL), a modular series of interactive web simulations that help students build intuition for PIC component design. The simulations are accessible to a broad audience, from undergraduate engineering students to experienced PIC designers. The IPSL offerings include 16 learning modules that combine video instruction, interactive web simulations, and assessment exercises to build intuition for PIC design. Students will understand a 3D perspective of how light travels in a dielectric waveguide, visualize EM superposition, and explore the behavior of prominent silicon photonic circuit components. The modules allow instructors to pick and choose which content to include in their own curriculum and are also packaged into three self-paced online courses.
The first online course, IPSL1 (Modules 1-5), is available online free of charge. It introduces waveguide modes, electromagnetic vector fields, mode superposition, and the dynamic behavior of light in a dielectric waveguide. Students will explore the behavior of multimode interferometers (MMIs), edge couplers, and grating couplers. The remaining two courses, IPSL2 (Modules 6-10) and IPSL3 (Modules 11-16), will be available later this year and will cover radial waveguide bends, directional couplers, splitters, combiners, Mach-Zehnder interferometers and modulators, ring resonators, 1D Bragg grating filters and cavities, polarization splitter/rotators, waveguide escalators, and more.
Students can register for the first free course at the following link: Register Here
To find out how to include a subset of this material in your course or program, please get in touch with the MIT development team at the following email address: vmlab@mit.edu
Instructors can preview many of the upcoming interactive simulations at the AIM Photonics website: IPSL Simulations
MIT and AIM Photonics are committed to ensuring a highly skilled labor force to support the industry through education and workforce development programs that support manufacturing within the entire integrated photonics industry. To see more photonics courses available online, click on the link below.