German-Japanese Academia-Industry International Collaboration
Program on Optics and Photonics

This proposal aims at opening an industrial avenue towards compact high-speed electro-optic (EO) modulators that combine unprecedented energy efficiency and the potential for cost-efficient mass production with outstanding performance and wide applicability. The devices rely on the concept of silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) integration that combines advanced EO polymers with silicon nanowire waveguide structures and thus merges the tremendous processing advantages of silicon photonics with the wealth of optical properties that can be obtained by molecular engineering of organic materials. This project builds upon a rich portfolio of research results that were obtained by the Japanese and German research partner over the last few years, demonstrating the basic viability and the outstanding performance advantages of the SOH concept and of the involved materials. Within this project, our goal is now to eliminate the two remaining roadblocks toward successful industrial exploitation of the SOH concept: long-term stability and reliability of the EO polymer and cost-efficient low-loss optical packaging of the resulting devices.

The project aims towards a new type of projector system with the potential to make a strong impact on various fields of applications including augmented reality, man-machine interaction, robotics, vehicle control, etc. Such applications place high demands on high-speed sensing and display technologies capable of acquiring the 3D-shape and color texture of dynamically-changing environment, tracking the target robustly, and controlling the visual appearance of real world by projecting images with low latency. The potential level of speed is estimated to reach into 1000 fps. We have explored solutions for such demands in recent years and developed various prototypes. The prototypes attracted a wide range of users, and we successfully determined their common needs allowing us to move into the next phase from pure academic research and explore this technology in practical applications. The main goal is to realize a specialized projector connecting the sensing and display closely inside the projection technology. Based on this motivation, we aim for the development of a projector generating RED/GREEN/BLUE and NIR patterns simultaneously at extreme speed and precisely synchronized to multiple cameras.

Grating-based X-ray phase imaging methodology, developed in the field of X-ray optics, has attracted strong attention in the last decade due to the fact materials consisting of light elements, such as polymers and biological soft tissues, that produce insufficient contrast by conventional X-ray radiography can be imaged with a laboratory X-ray generator. Therefore, its implementation with in practical application in clinical “diagnoses at hospitals and non-destructive testing at factories can be envisioned. The X-ray transmission gratings used in the method require high aspect-ratio structures and their grating period is usually in the range of several microns. The spatial resolution attained by the method has been limited by the grating period, and a way to overcome the limit is desired especially for keeping a large field of view for high-end applications in materials analysis and non-destructive quality control in production processes. For this purpose, this project develops hyper-resolution X-ray phase imaging (HyReXPhI) by combining Japanese X-ray phase imaging technology and German fabrication technology of X-ray optical elements (in this project, high aspect-ratio X-ray transmission gratings) by means of X-ray lithography and electroforming.