Bookham Technology Centre of Excellence in Optoelectronic

Principal Investigator: Professor T M Benson

Starts: December 2000
Ends: December 2006

Value: £508000

Bookham Technology plc established their Centre of Excellence in Optoelectronic Simulation within the Electromagnetics Research Group (now the GGIEMR) at Nottingham University in 2000, investing in consultancy, a Lectureship, a Research Fellow, PhD students, high performance computer and our laboratory equipment and infrastructure. The Centre has (i) developed leading-edge simulation tools for complex optoelectronic components (used as the basis of Bookham Technology’s simulation package), (ii) undertaken product orientated research and delivered sophisticated designs and design software based upon it, (iii) provided expert opinion to Bookham Technology on device designs, electromagnetic theory, and simulation approaches and (iv) provided training and expertise to staff at Bookham Technology. Significant contributions have included the simulation of optical chip-to-fibre coupling, allowing for angling and multiple coating of the two components, waveguide curvature loss calculations, analysis of multimode interference couplers, thermal models, and detailed advice and tuition on methods and analysis. The use of structure related co-ordinates and improved discretisation schemes, that allow small features to be arbitrarily embedded within a larger mesh, are amongst the techniques that have enabled numerical schemes such as the Finite Difference Beam Propagation methods (FD-BPM) to model significantly more complex systems than hitherto possible.