Lionel C. Kimerling

About

Professor Lionel C. Kimerling is the Thomas Lord Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. His research centers on the design and processing of semiconductor materials and devices, with a fundamental impact on understanding the chemical and electrical properties of defects in semiconductors. His work has enabled the development of long-lasting telecommunications lasers, the production of the first 1 MB DRAM, the development of semiconductor diagnostic methods, and the pioneering of silicon microphotonics. His MIT research on silicon processing has addressed areas including integrated circuit fabrication, microphotonic materials and devices, solar energy conversion, and environmentally benign integrated circuit manufacturing. Professor Kimerling earned a BS in metallurgy in 1965 and a PhD in 1968, both from MIT. He was head of the Materials Physics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining the MIT faculty in 1990. He is the founding director of the MIT Microphotonics Center and served as director of the MIT Materials Processing Center for 15 years, establishing it as an industry portal for faculty across materials-related disciplines. He leads MIT’s Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing and is the AIM Photonics Institute executive for education and workforce development. With over 600 technical articles and more than 75 patents in integrated photonics and semiconductor processing, Professor Kimerling is recognized as a…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Materials science
• Optoelectronics
• Optics
• Telecommunications
• Engineering
• Physics
• Software engineering
• Embedded system
• Systems engineering

Selected publications

• Integrated Photonics Packaging: Challenges and Opportunities

  ACS Photonics · 2022 · 87 citations

  Packaging of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) chips is an essential and critical step before they can be integrated into functional optoelectronic systems. Photonic packaging is however often a major barrier impeding scalable deployment of PIC technologies given its high cost and limited throughput. This perspective addresses the technical challenges and discusses promising strategies and research directions to overcome the “packaging bottleneck”.

  DOI

• High efficiency four wave mixing and optical bistability in amorphous silicon carbide ring resonators

  APL Photonics · 2020 · 40 citations

  We demonstrate high efficiency wavelength conversion via four wave mixing in amorphous silicon carbide ring resonators with a loaded quality factor of 70 000. Owing to the high quality factor and high nonlinearity of amorphous silicon carbide, −21 dB conversion efficiency is achieved with 15 mW pump power. Moreover, the thermo-optic coefficient (TOC) of amorphous silicon carbide is measured to be 1.4 × 10−4/°C at telecommunication wavelengths. Taking advantage of the high TOC, we demonstrate opt…

  DOI

• High spectro-temporal compression on a nonlinear CMOS-chip

  Light Science & Applications · 2021 · 33 citations

  Optical pulses are fundamentally defined by their temporal and spectral properties. The ability to control pulse properties allows practitioners to efficiently leverage them for advanced metrology, high speed optical communications and attosecond science. Here, we report 11× temporal compression of 5.8 ps pulses to 0.55 ps using a low power of 13.3 W. The result is accompanied by a significant increase in the pulse peak power by 9.4×. These results represent the strongest temporal compression de…

  DOI

• Highly efficient fiber to Si waveguide free-form coupler for foundry-scale silicon photonics

  Photonics Research · 2024-03-18 · 15 citations

  article

  As silicon photonics transitions from research to commercial deployment, packaging solutions that efficiently couple light into highly compact and functional sub-micrometer silicon waveguides are imperative but remain challenging. The 220 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, poised to enable large-scale integration, is the most widely adopted by foundries, resulting in established fabrication processes and extensive photonic component libraries. The development of a highly efficient, scalable…

  PublisherDOI

• Low Loss Chip‐to‐Chip Couplers for High‐Density Co‐Packaged Optics

  Advanced Engineering Materials · 2024-12-08 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  An experimentally demonstrated, vertical chip‐to‐chip evanescent coupler between silicon nitride (SiN) and silicon (Si) is presented with the coupler loss measured to be 0.39 1.06 dB at 1550 nm with a 1‐dB bandwidth of 160 nm extending across the C‐band, S‐band, and L‐band (1480–1640 nm). The average coupling loss is determined to be 0.73 dB for the 1480–1640 nm wavelength range with a 2 σ tolerance of 0.92 dB. The 1‐dB lateral alignment tolerance is 1.56 0.14 μm at 1550 nm and the average toler…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Anu Agarwal

  336 shared

• Jürgen Michel

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  323 shared

• Juejun Hu

  180 shared

• Vivek Singh

  L V Prasad Eye Institute

  121 shared

• Kathleen Richardson

  106 shared

• Dawn T. H. Tan

  96 shared

• Pao Tai Lin

  Texas A&M University

  89 shared

• Zhengli Han

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  71 shared

Labs

• Electronic Materials Research GroupPI

Education

• Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1990

• M.S., Materials Science and Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1986

• B.S., Materials Science and Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1984

Awards & honors

• John Bardeen Award, The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society…
• Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising,…
• Electronics Division Award, The Electrochemical Society (199…
• Humboldt Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (…

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Yang Shao-Hornh-143
• Ju Lih-141
• Yet-Ming Chiangh-102