Student review [#104163] for Electrical and Computer Engineering
at University of Delaware - UD/UDEL

The University of Delaware offers a strong interdisciplinary research environment for silicon photonics, bringing together expertise in electrical engineering, materials science, nanotechnology, optics, and device physics. Research within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering spans integrated photonic devices and circuits, optical interconnects, modulators, detectors, quantum photonics, and emerging photonic-computing platforms. This combination of fundamental and applied research allows new concepts in light generation, manipulation, transmission, and detection to be investigated and translated into functional chip-scale devices.

A central resource supporting this work is the University of Delaware Nanofabrication Facility, or UDNF. The facility provides the infrastructure, technical expertise, and advanced processing capabilities required to fabricate and evaluate nanoscale photonic devices. Its capabilities include high-resolution lithography, material deposition, dry and wet etching, thermal processing, structural characterization, dicing, and device packaging. These resources support the fabrication of silicon and silicon-on-insulator structures such as waveguides, resonators, photonic crystals, metasurfaces, modulators, and integrated optical components.

UDNF is especially valuable because it enables researchers to carry out repeated cycles of device design, fabrication, characterization, and process optimization within a shared research facility. University of Delaware researchers have used its capabilities to fabricate silicon-based integrated-photonics platforms, including nanoscale metalens and metasurface structures for on-chip optical signal processing. The facility therefore serves not only as a fabrication center but also as an important research environment for developing new materials, improving manufacturing methods, training graduate students, and translating silicon-photonics concepts into experimentally demonstrated devices.