CA-01 — Post doctoral Researcher or Research Assistant in FPGA based Control Circuit Design and Prototyping for Reconfigurable Photonic Circuits
Contract: Full Time/Fixed Term
The Photonic Systems Group (photonics) at Tyndall National Institute is seeking a highly motivated candidate for a position as Post-Doctoral Research Scientist or a Research Assistant working on the European project PHORMIC which is a follow-up from a previously successful EU project MORPHIC ().
PHORMIC is a European collaborative project that will develop a new class of photonic chips that can be programmed to suit a specific application.
PHORMIC has the ambition to enhance silicon photonics with low-power MEMS actuators and transfer-printed III-V amplifiers to enable self-contained large-scale programmable photonic circuits interfaced with driver electronics.
The project partners (imec, KTH, Tyndall National Institute, ASM AMICRA, III-V Labs, NVIDIA, Sentea, VLC Photonics, X-FAB MEMS FOUNDRY) will combine silicon photonics with microscopic moving elements (MEMS) to build programmable photonic chips.
PHORMIC's chips will have the potential to accelerate the photonics supply chain dramatically, achieve performance improvements in size and power consumption, and boost the adoption of photonics technologies in various applications.
The PHORMIC platform will be validated using technology demonstrators in diverse application domains - datacenter communication, structural and environmental sensing and microwave/mm-wave signal processing.
The successful candidate will work on developing control and readout electronics for the programmable photonic chips.
The specific challenges will include the design of the control circuitry for the MEMS elements, monitoring photodiodes and light sources using off-the-shelf electronic components.
Programming strategies to implement software feedback loops to control the photonic chips will be implemented utilising microcontrollers or FPGAs to execute sequences of operation such as activating and reading the photodiodes taps, operating the MEMS elements and optimisation of the tuneable elements.
The work will be carried out in close collaboration with Tyndall Photonics Packaging Group in order to address the challenge of controlling thousands of photonics and MEMS elements on a single programmable photonic chip.
The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to be actively involved in the broader research programme of the Photonic Systems Group in the area of next generation access networks and short reach interconnects.
This will involve collaboration with parallel ongoing projects and partners of the Irish Photonic Integration Centre (IPIC) ().
Key Responsibilities
Essential Criteria
Desirable Criteria
This is a fulltime Researcher/Research Engineer opportunity in University College Cork, initially for 18 months, with further extension to 36 months, subject to successful project progress.