ECE Student Recognized for Infrared Detector Array Research
PhD Student Wins II-VI Casselman-Spicer Award
By Shereen Abubakr (QST ’18)
The organizing committee of the U.S. Workshop on the Physics and Chemistry of II-VI Materials selects a student each year to receive the II-VI Casselman-Spicer Award. The award recognizes outstanding student paper presentations and the related research work. ECE PhD Student Taylor Hubbard (PhD ‘21) received the award during the November 2017 workshop.
Entitled “Numerical Modeling of Three-dimensional Microlenses for IR Focal Plane Arrays,” Hubbard explains that “the project investigates how micro lenses can improve the ability of photo-detector pixel arrays to capture sharp, high resolution images.” While microlens arrays are often fabricated separately and attached to imaging devices, this work focused on monolithic microlenses formed from the same semiconductor wafer as the substrate of the device. The lenses do not increase the number of photons absorbed by a given pixel, but rather focus light to the pixel centers, helping to ensure that photogenerated carriers do not wander to neighboring pixels before being registered by the system.
Hubbard credits Brian Appleton (ECE M.S. ’18) and ECE PhD student Andreu Glasmann (EE ’20) for inspiring and contributing to the research objective. The idea for the project came from the Computation Electronics Group; specifically from research that was spearheaded by Glasmann. Appleton offered a beneficial two dimensional simulation of the phenomena.