We have a wide variety of facilities available to us that we use to design, fabricate, and test many interesting photonic devices.  Some of these facilities are shared with other research groups at USC while others are unique to our research group.  This page contains a brief description of some of the tools we use to conduct our research.

The Keck Photonic Laboratory
The Device Characterization Facilities
The MPDG Workstation Cluster

Keck Photonic Laboratory

Plasmaquest Model 98 ECR System from KECK Photonic Lab

The Keck Photonic Laboratory is a Class-100 cleanroom located on the USC campus and used by several research groups at USC in the fabrication of optical devices as well as some electronic integrated circuitry.  This facility is equiped with a Philips scanning electron microscope which we have modified to do sub-micron electron beam lithography.

Also in this cleanroom, we have various plasma etching tools including the electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) system shown above, several reactive ion etch (RIE) systems, and a reactive ion beam etch (RIBE) milling system.  In addition to these tools, this cleanroom is equipped with CVD dielectric deposition systems, metal sputtering and evaporation tools, photolithography aligners, and wet chemical etching systems.  For more information about this facility, click here.

Hitachi Field Emission SEM

Our group recently installed a Hitachi S-4800 Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope in our lab.  This FESEM will dramatically improve our imaging capabilities with its 1nm resolution.   For a sample of some of the spectacular images that this microscope is capable of taking, click here.

Device Characterization Facilities

Our two characterization labs are equipped with a variety of equipment for testing optoelectronic devices and circuits.  Our laser characterization lab allows us to optically pump photonic crystal lasers.  Pulse measurements are also possible with our HP Data Generator and HP Network Analyzer.

Our passive device characterization lab is equipped with two New Focus tunable laser systems allowing us to tune the wavelength over 1400nm-1630nm with four tunable laser heads.  In addition, we have piezoelectric controlled stages for coupling light into and out of our planar optical devices.  A free space Mach-Zehnder interferometer allows us to characterize waveguide dispersion and phase properties of novel photonic devices.

Our cluster allows us to numerically model our photonic devices before we fabricate them.  With over 10GB of RAM distributed across the processor nodes, we can model some rather large devices.