Photonic Spectrometer
Abstract
Spectroscopy involves the measurement of the spectrum of light, which is routinely used for medical diagnosis, astronomy, remote sensing, gas sensing, and many more applications. Silicon photonics has enabled photonic instrumentation that can be realized on a chip instead of bulk optics, leading to spectrometers that can be very stable, low-cost and very compact.
Project Details
This project is about the development of a spectrometer that is fully integrated into a chip. We have partnered with the National Research Council of Canada to develop a chip that will guide light through an integrated diffraction grating, the goal of which is to then capture the light outputted by the chip and attain and view a spectrum of light.
Proposed Method
The solution is to create a photonic spectrometer that uses an SOI (Silicon on insulator) wafer chip design. This wafer chip will be low cost, very compact, very stable and high performance. Around 3 silicon wafer chips will be created, designed and tested on a light source using a fiber coupling setup. We will also use a Raspberry Pi to run programming code, the user interface and operate the camera that will detect and display the color spectrum The photonic spectrometer will be packed inside of a 3D printed box to avoid damaging the raspberry pi, silicon chip and camera.
Our programs
The main programming language we are using is Python. Python is full of libraries that allow users to interact with a variety of different programs and technologies.
To capture our results, we are using the Python Library PiCamera. This allows us to use many functions and commands specifically tailored around the Raspberry Pi's camera sensor.