简介

Professor White has extensive experience in fabrication and packaging of optical and electronic devices, and will draw on that background to tackle challenging problems involved with the novel optical devices that will be required for future exabit networks. In addition to exploring prototype devices and packages that exploit the nanometer control offered by additive manufacturing using high-resolution 3D printing, she expects to take advantage of the excellent central facilities available through her affiliations with the Division of Materials Science and the Photonics Center. Professor White came to BU in September 2013 from Bell Labs, where she was Chief Scientist. Her research career spanned many areas, but common themes have been fabrication and materials. After a PhD thesis and a postdoc looking at the physics of electronic transport in 1D metal wires at low temperatures, she moved into using high-dose ion implantation to synthesize materials, including implanting Co ions to make high-quality crystalline layers of CoSi2 inside a silicon wafer. Switching fields once again, she worked on novel fiber devices, fabricating phase masks by reactive ion etching of glass to make fiber-Bragg-grating devices manufacturable. This led to a work in so-called “silicon optical bench” technology, which uses semiconductor processing techniques to create optical subassemblies for lasers and detectors as well as optical waveguide interconnects. More recently, she worked on extending this technology to integrate both photonics and electronics in silicon using a commercial CMOS fabrication facility.