Designing and optimizing Application Specific Photonic Integrated Circuit (ASPICs) requires knowledge of how to integrate specific active optical devices.
A photon detector has a surface that absorbs photons and produces an effect (current, voltage) proportional to the number of photons absorbed or counted.
Optoelectronic devices are used in a wide variety of application areas such as optical fiber communications, laser technology, and all kinds of optical metrology.
Compared with metallic conductors, optical fibres allow greater bandwidth, are immune to electromagnetic interference, lighter and smaller and have a lower power loss.
Lasers (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) are the work horses of many photonics devises and can be categorised according to the lasing medium.
Micro-optics are tiny (less than 2 mm in diameter) lenses fabricated using standard technologies from the semiconductor industry, like resist coating, lithography, reactive ion etching and deposition.
Photonic devices and systems based on miniaturised photonic integrated circuits (PICs), are compact, light, reliable, cheap and provide great performance.