An efficient numerical method to simulate a subpicosecond semiconductor optical switch is developed in this research. The problem under studying involves both electromagnetic wave propagation and semiconductor dynamic transport, which is a nonlinear phenomenon. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique is used to approximate the time dependent Maxwell's equations for full-wave analysis of the wave propagation. The dynamic transport is handled by solving the balance equations using the energy and momentum relaxation time approximation. Based on the structure of the device, a physical semi-analytical model is also developed for preliminary analysis. Simulation results in the device's subpicosecond responses including nonlinearity and overshoot. The validity of the method is verified by comparing the simulation with the published experimental results. The method can be extended to other devices as well. / Ph. D.

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This thesis puts focus on the technological challenges for Wavelength Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network (WDM-PON) implementation, and presents novel semiconductor optical devices for deployment at the optical network unit (ONU). The first-ever reported L-band Reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) is presented based on InP-base material. A theoretical model is developed to estimate the optical gain and the saturation power of this device compared to a conventional SOA. Experiments on this device design show long-range telecom wavelength operation, with polarization-independent gain of greater than 20 dB, and low saturation output power of 0 dBm suitable for PON applications. Next, the effect of the amplified spontaneous emission noise of RSOA devices on WDM-PON system is investigated. It is shown through theoretical modeling and simulations that the RSOA noise combined with receiver noise statistics increase probability of error, and induce considerable power penalties to the WDM-PON system. By improving the coupling efficiencies, and by distributing more current flow to the input of these devices, steps can be taken to improve device noise characteristics. Further, in spectrally-spliced WDM-PONs deploying RSOAs, the effect of AWG filter shape on system performance is investigated. Simulation modeling and experiments show that deployment of Flat-band AWGs is critical for reducing the probability of error caused by AWG spectral shape filtering. Flat-band athermal AWGs in comparison to Gaussin-shape counterparts satisfy the maximum acceptable error probability requirements, and reduce the power penalty associated with filtering effect. In addition, detuning between two AWG center wavelengths impose further power penalties to the WDM-PON system. In the last section of this thesis, motivated by RSOA device system limitations, a novel injection-locked Fabry-Perot (IL-FP) device is presented which consists of a gain section monolithically integrated with a phase section. The gain section provides locking of one FP mode to a seed source wavelength, while the phase modulator allows for adjusting the wavelength of the internal modes by tuning bias current to maintain mode-locking. This device counters any mode drifts caused by temperature variations, and allows for cooler-less operation over a wide range of currents. The devices and the performance metrics subsequently allow for a hybrid integration platform on a silicon substrate and integrate many functionalities like reflective modulator with thin film dielectric filter and receiver on a single chip for deployment at the user-end of future-proof low cost WDM-PONs.

The use of optical fiber is of great interest in developing extensive, high-speed networking infrastructures. Optical fiber provide many advantages over traditional copper cables and wireless links. Among them are high security, low electromagnetic interference, extremely low loss and high bandwidths, light weight and manageability. However, the very small wavelengths associated with optical radiation requires very small waveguide dimensions. Waveguide dimension of single mode fiber (SMF) are < 10µm, resulting in relatively poor yield in device manufacturing. For residential and other last-mile networks topologies, cost constraints limit the appeal of SMF. Multimode fiber (MMF) allow for less restrictive manufacturing tolerances; however, the distortion that results from the dispersion in propagation among the many modes can be prohibitively large for data rates approaching and exceeding 1 Gb/s. To improve the deployability of MMF, a method of dispersion compensation that maintains the ease-of-use characteristic of MMF is required This dissertation demonstrates an opto-electronic method of dispersion compensation by the use of a multisegment photodetector. It is shown the modes of the fiber can be seperated such that when the individual photodetector signals are combined, the resulting temporal response of the fiber link is improved from that of a conventional fiber link. This method is extremely robust to system variation and is independent of data rate and transmission format, allowing it to be employed in a wide variety of optical links. More importantly, the implementation demonstrated is comparable, in simplicity and alignment tolerance, to a conventional photodetector. System performance is shown using both temporal and frequency response as well as real bit error rate and eye diagram measurements.

The ever-increasing need for higher bandwidth and density is one of the motivations for extensive research on planar optoelectronic structures on printed circuit board (PCB) substrates. Among these applications, optical interconnects have received considerable attention in the last decade. Several optical interconnect techniques, such as free space, guided wave, board level and fiber array interconnects, have been introduced for system level applications. In all planar optoelectronic systems, optical waveguides are crucial elements that facilitate signal routing. Low propagation loss, high reliability and manufacturability are among the requirements of polymer optical waveguides and polymer passive devices on PCB substrates for practical applications. Besides fabrication requirements, reliable characterization tools are needed to accurately and nondestructively measure important guiding properties, such as waveguide propagation loss. In three-dimensional (3D) fully embedded board-level optical interconnects, another key challenge is to realize efficient optical coupling between in-plane waveguides and out-of-plane laser/detector devices. Driven by these motivations, the research presented in this thesis focuses on some fundamental studies of optical interconnects for PCB substrates, e.g., developing low-loss optical polymer waveguides with integrated efficient out-of-plane couplers for optical interconnects on printed circuit board substrates, as well as the demonstration of a novel free-space optical interconnect system by using a volume holographic thin film. Firstly, the theoretical and experimental investigations on the limitations of using mercury i-line ultraviolet (UV) proximity photolithography have been carried out, and the metallization techniques for fine copper line formation are explored. Then, a new type of low-loss polymer waveguides (i.e., capped waveguide) is demonstrated by using contact photolithography with considerable performance improvement over the conventional waveguides. To characterize the propagation properties of planar optical waveguides, a reliable, nondestructive, and real-time technique is presented based on accurately imaging the scattered light from the waveguide using a sensitive charge coupled device (CCD) camera that has a built-in integration functionality. To provide surface normal light coupling between waveguides and optoelectronic devices for optical interconnects, a simple method is presented here to integrate 45° total internal reflection micro-mirrors with polymer optical waveguides by an improved tilted beam photolithography (with the aid of de-ionized water) on PCBs. A new technique is developed for a thin layer of metal coating on the micro-mirrors to achieve higher reflection and coupling efficiency (i.e., above 90%). The combination of the capped waveguide technique and the improved tilted UV exposure technique along with a hard reusable metal mask for metal deposition eliminates the usage of the traditional lift-off process, greatly simplifies the process, and reduces fabrication cost without sacrificing the coating quality. For the study of free-space optical interconnects, a simple system is presented by employing a single thin-film polymeric volume holographic element. One 2-spherical-beam hologram is used to link each point light source with the corresponding photodetector. An 8-channel free-space optical interconnect system with high link efficiency is demonstrated by using a single volume holographic element where 8 holograms are recorded.

Light emitting transistors (LETs) and transistor lasers (TLs) are newly-emerging optoelectronic devices capable of emitting spontaneous or stimulated light while performing transistor actions. This dissertation describes the design, growth, and performances of long wavelength LETs and TLs based on InAlGaAs/InP material system. First, the doping behaviors of zinc (Zn) and carbon (C) in InAlGaAs layers for p-type doping were investigated. Using both dopants, the N-InP/p-In0.52(AlxGa1-x)0.48As/N-In0.52Al0.48As LETs with InGaAs quantum wells (QWs) in the base demonstrate both light emission and current gains (β). The device performances of Zn- and C-doped LETs have been compared, which is explained by a charge control analysis involving the quantum capture and recombination process in the QWs. A TL based on a C-doped double heterostructure (DH-TL) with single QW was designed and fabricated. The device lases at 77 K with a threshold current density (Jth) of 2.25 kA/cm2, emission wavelength (λ) at ~1.55 µm, and β of 0.02. The strong intervalence band absorption (IVBA) is considered as the main intrinsic optical loss that prohibits the device from lasing at room temperature. Based on a threshold condition analysis taking into account the strong IVBA, it is found that room-temperature lasing of a DH-TL is achieved only when the base thickness and doping level are within a specific narrow range and improved performance is expected in a separate confinement heterostructure (SCH) TL.

Measuring acoustic pressure gradients is critical in many applications such as directional microphones for hearing aids and sound intensity probes. This measurement is especially challenging with decreasing microphone size, which reduces the sensitivity due to small spacing between the pressure ports. Novel, micromachined biomimetic microphone diaphragms are shown to provide high sensitivity to pressure gradients on one side of the diaphragm with low thermal mechanical noise. These structures have a dominant mode shape with see-saw like motion in the audio band, responding to pressure gradients as well as spurious higher order modes sensitive to pressure. In this dissertation, integration of a diffraction based optical detection method with these novel diaphragm structures to implement a low noise optical pressure gradient microphone is described and experimental characterization results are presented, showing 36 dBA noise level with 1mm port spacing, nearly an order of magnitude better than the current gradient microphones. The optical detection scheme also provides electrostatic actuation capability from both sides of the diaphragm separately which can be used for active force feedback. A 4-port electromechanical equivalent circuit model of this microphone with optical readout is developed to predict the overall response of the device to different acoustic and electrostatic excitations. The model includes the damping due to complex motion of air around the microphone diaphragm, and it calculates the detected optical signal on each side of the diaphragm as a combination of two separate dominant vibration modes. This equivalent circuit model is verified by experiments and used to predict the microphone response with different force feedback schemes. Single sided force feedback is used for active damping to improve the linearity and the frequency response of the microphone. Furthermore, it is shown that using two sided force feedback one can significantly suppress or enhance the desired vibration modes of the diaphragm. This approach provides an electronic means to tailor the directional response of the microphones, with significant implications in device performance for various applications. As an example, the use of this device as a particle velocity sensor for sound intensity and sound power measurements is investigated. Without force feedback, the gradient microphone provides accurate particle velocity measurement for frequencies below 2 kHz, after which the pressure response of the second order mode becomes significant. With two-sided force feedback, the calculations show that this upper frequency limit may be increased to 10 kHz. This improves the pressure residual intensity index by more than 15 dB in the 50 Hz-10 kHz range, matching the Class I requirements of IEC 1043 standards for intensity probes without any need for multiple spacers.

This work targeted the growth of gadolinium (Gd)-doped gallium nitride (GaN) thin films (Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN) by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Characterization and evaluation of these Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN thin films for application in spintronics/optoelectronics devices also formed part of this work. This work presents: (1) the first report of stable, reproducible n- and p-type Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN thin films by MOCVD; (2) the first Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN p-n diode structure; and (3) the first report of a room temperature spin-polarized LED using a Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN spin injection layer. The Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN thin films grown in this work were electrically conductive, and co-doping them with Silicon (Si) or Magnesium (Mg) resulted in n-type and p-type materials, respectively. All the materials and structures grown in this work, including the Ga₁₋ₓGdₓN-based p-n diode and spin polarized LED, were characterized for their structural, optical, electrical and magnetic properties. The spin-polarized LED gave spin polarization ratio of 22% and systematic variation of this ratio at room temperature with external magnetic field was observed.

This thesis puts focus on the technological challenges for Wavelength Division Multiplexed Passive Optical Network (WDM-PON) implementation, and presents novel semiconductor optical devices for deployment at the optical network unit (ONU). The first-ever reported L-band Reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) is presented based on InP-base material. A theoretical model is developed to estimate the optical gain and the saturation power of this device compared to a conventional SOA. Experiments on this device design show long-range telecom wavelength operation, with polarization-independent gain of greater than 20 dB, and low saturation output power of 0 dBm suitable for PON applications. Next, the effect of the amplified spontaneous emission noise of RSOA devices on WDM-PON system is investigated. It is shown through theoretical modeling and simulations that the RSOA noise combined with receiver noise statistics increase probability of error, and induce considerable power penalties to the WDM-PON system. By improving the coupling efficiencies, and by distributing more current flow to the input of these devices, steps can be taken to improve device noise characteristics. Further, in spectrally-spliced WDM-PONs deploying RSOAs, the effect of AWG filter shape on system performance is investigated. Simulation modeling and experiments show that deployment of Flat-band AWGs is critical for reducing the probability of error caused by AWG spectral shape filtering. Flat-band athermal AWGs in comparison to Gaussin-shape counterparts satisfy the maximum acceptable error probability requirements, and reduce the power penalty associated with filtering effect. In addition, detuning between two AWG center wavelengths impose further power penalties to the WDM-PON system. In the last section of this thesis, motivated by RSOA device system limitations, a novel injection-locked Fabry-Perot (IL-FP) device is presented which consists of a gain section monolithically integrated with a phase section. The gain section provides locking of one FP mode to a seed source wavelength, while the phase modulator allows for adjusting the wavelength of the internal modes by tuning bias current to maintain mode-locking. This device counters any mode drifts caused by temperature variations, and allows for cooler-less operation over a wide range of currents. The devices and the performance metrics subsequently allow for a hybrid integration platform on a silicon substrate and integrate many functionalities like reflective modulator with thin film dielectric filter and receiver on a single chip for deployment at the user-end of future-proof low cost WDM-PONs.

Thesis (M.E.-Res.)--University of Wollongong, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: p. 164-179.