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Home > News > Great optics

Great optics

Berkeley Engineer Fall 2014
November 1, 2014 by Jennifer Huber
This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Fall 2014
  • In this issue

    Features

    Freedom phones

    Body mechanics

    Where vision meets know-how

    Dean’s Word

    Upfront

    • Launching ‘dev eng’
    • The big picture: Averaging Internet images
    • Smarter stethoscopes
    • Q+A with Grace O’Connell
    • STEM pipeline: Girls in Engineering
    • Comments

    Breakthroughs

    • Great optics: Harnessing light for circuitry 
    • Sight for sore eyes: Vision-correcting display technology
    • Rejuvenating old muscles
    • Evolutionary algorithms
    • Herding cells with electricity

    Alumni notes

    • Smart spoons
    • Measuring DNA health
    • Farewell

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Connie Chang-Hasnain

Whinnery Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences Connie Chang-Hasnain was named associate dean for strategic alliances in July. (Photo by Noah Berger)

Harnessing light with photonic integrated circuits on silicon promises to catalyze powerful new applications in energy-efficient telecommunications, computing and more, as standard electronic circuits did in the past. This requires photonic devices to be integrated into dense, high-performing circuits, which may now be possible using semiconductor nanostructures developed in the lab of Connie Chang-Hasnain, Whinnery Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. Her team has designed a robust toolkit of nano-optoelectronic circuit elements—including light emitters, photodetectors, a photovoltaic power supply and optical links to connect these devices into circuits—that were found to perform as well as their traditional counterparts. Chang-Hasnain and her students discovered a new method to grow light-efficient nanoresonators on a silicon substrate. Then they can use conventional nanofabrication techniques to make photonic integrated circuits, making product manufacturing easier down the line.

Topics: Nanotechnology, Electrical engineering, Faculty, Research
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