Monday, October 7, 2019 - 4:00pm to 4:50pm
Gilfillan Auditorium

Speaker Information

Alan Wang
Associate professor
School of EECS
Oregon State University

Abstract

Communication and computing has already consumed more than 5% of the world electricity. Reducing the energy consumption of existing information infrastructures requires fundamental breakthroughs in both devices and systems. Integrated photonics, especially silicon photonics, hold the promise to transform the realm of optical communication and optical computing, which can meet the explosive requirement of bandwidth and computation power for the decade to come. In this seminar, I will discuss a new type of extremely energy-efficient silicon photonic devices through the integration with transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), which can potential reduce the energy consumption of existing silicon photonic devices by three orders of magnitude. I will review recent research progress in my group for the development of TCO-gated silicon photonic devices, including silicon-TCO photonic crystal nanocavity modulators, silicon-TCO microring resonators with ultra-large E-O tuning efficiency, and broadband plasmonic-TCO electro-absorption modulators. We achieved 5Gbit/s E-O modulation speed and will also discuss the strategy to further improve the energy efficiency to atto-joule/bit (10-18J/bit) and operation bandwidth above 25 GHz.

Speaker Bio

Alan Xiaolong Wang is an Associate Professor of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, and M.S. degree from the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China, in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. From January 2007 to August 2011, he was with Omega Optics, Inc., Austin, Texas, where he served as the Chief Research Scientist for multiple government funded Small Business Innovative Research projects. During his research career, he has raised over $7 M dollars in externally-funded research from various government agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), US Navy, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with several industry sponsors such as Hewlett Packard. He joined OSU as an Assistant Professor in August 2011 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. He is also the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of E-Lambda LLC, a startup company based in Corvallis, OR. His current research activities spans over integrated and nanophotonic devices including photonic crystals and surface plasmonics, silicon photonics incorporating emerging functional materials such as electro-optic polymers and transparent conductive oxides, free space optical communication, and various nano-scale optical sensors based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering, infrared absorption, and fluorescence imaging.

He has more than 100 journal publications and more than 100 conference presentations including 16 plenary/invited presentations, and also holds seven granted or pending U.S. patents. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Optical Society of America (OSA), and the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).