Electrical Engineering Professors Awarded Grant for Research on Sapphire-Based Integrated Microwave Photonics

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The National Science Foundation's division of Electrical, Communications & Cyber Systems, through the Electronics, Photonics and Magnetic Devices program, has awarded two electrical engineering professors a grant of just over $250,000 to develop a new Integrated Microwave Photonics chip.

The awarded project, entitled "EAGER: Sapphire Based Integrated Microwave Photonics," will be headed by Samir El-Ghazaly, principal investigator and distinguished professor in electrical engineering, and Shui-Qing "Fisher" Yu, co-principal investigator and associate professor in electrical engineering.

Microwave photonics refers to a field that utilizes light as a carrier to process high-frequency electrical signals and is a technology that has significant impact in defense and civilian applications. Future applications of microwave photonics technology demand dramatic improvements in performance and efficiency, including reductions in size, weight, and power consumption. The objective of this project is to develop a hybrid photonic chip that meets these demands. El-Ghazaly and Yu will approach this feat through the utilization of R-plane Sapphire, a high-performance platform with the capability of producing fully-integrated microwave photonics systems.

The successful development of a microwave photonics chip on an R-Sapphire platform has the potential to result in significant applications in defense systems, such as radar signal processing, and civilian applications such as cell phone technology, sensing, and Datacom.