This short course teaches students and industry professionals how to design integrated optical devices and circuits, using a hands-on approach with commercial tools. We will fabricate your designs using a state-of-the-art ($5M) silicon photonic rapid-prototyping 100 keV electron-beam lithography facility. We will measure your designs using an automated optical probe station and provide you the data. You will then analyze your experimental data. Why take this course? To get hands on design experience with integrated optics To learn how to use advanced optical design tools To get your design fabricated, and obtain experimental data The focus of this course is a design project, guided by lectures, tutorials and activities. As a first-time designer, you will design an interferometer, which is a widely used device in many applications such as communications (modulation, switching) and sensing. Specifically, it is Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, consisting of fibre grating couplers, two splitters, and optical waveguides. For advanced designers, this course is an opportunity to design many other devices, such as directional couplers, ring, racetrack and disk resonators, Bragg gratings including grating assisted contra-directional couplers, photonic crystals, multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers, polarization diversity components, mode-division multiplexing (MDM) components and circuits, novel waveguides such as sub-wavelength grating (SWG) and metamaterial waveguides, slot waveguides, etc. Commercial software tool licenses are provided in this course (Lumerical Solutions and MATLAB). Open-source alternatives are provided. You will earn a professional certificate from the University of British Columbia and edX upon successful completion of this course. Certificates can be uploaded directly to your LinkedIn profile.
An excellent online course offered by edX: how it works
edX courses consist of weekly learning sequences. Each learning sequence is composed of short videos interspersed with interactive learning exercises, where students can immediately practise the concepts from the videos. The courses often include tutorial videos that are similar to small on-campus discussion groups, an online textbook, and an online discussion forum where students can post and review questions and comments to each other and teaching assistants. Where applicable, online laboratories are incorporated into the course.
edX offers certificates of successful completion and some courses are credit-eligible. Whether or not a college or university offers credit for an online course is within the sole discretion of the school. edX offers a variety of ways to take courses, including verified courses where students have the option to audit the course (no cost) or to work toward an edX Verified Certificate (fees vary by course). edX also offers XSeries Certificates for completion of a bundled set of two to seven verified courses in a single subject (cost varies depending on the courses).
An edX learning programme under Other Experiences