This laboratory consists of two facilities for fabrication and testing. Most of the antennas fabricated at the SMU antenna lab are microstrip antennas. Small and less complex antennas are made with milling machines, and a photolithic/chemical etching method is used to make more complex and large network analyzer. Workstations are avialable for antenna design and theoretical computation. Radiation characteristics are measured at the Dallas-SMU Antenna Characterization Lab located in Richardson, Texas.
Biomedical Engineering Laboratory
This laboratory contains instrumentation for carrying out research in electrophysiology, psychophysics and medical ultrasound. Four Grass physiographs permit the measurement of electroencephalograms as well as visual and auditory evoked brain potentials. The lab also contains a state-of-the art dual Purkinje eye tracker and image stabilizer made by Fourward Technologies Inc., a Vision Research Graphics 21-inch Digital Multisync Monitor for displaying visual stimuli, and a Cambridge Research Systems visual stimulus generator capable of generating a variety of stimuli for use in psychophysical and electrophysiological experiments. Ultrasound data can also measure with a Physical Acoustics apparatus consisting of a water tank, radio frequency pulser/receiver and radio frequency data acquisition system. Several PCs are also available for instrumentation control and data acquisition.
Multimedia Systems Laboratory
This facility includes an acoustic chamber with adjoining recording studio to allow high-quality sound recording to be made. The chamber is sound-isolating with double- or triple-wall sheet rock on all four sides, as well as an isolating ceiling barrier above the drop ceiling. The walls of the chamber have been constructed to be nonparallel to avoid flutter echo and dominant frequency modes. Acoustic paneling on the walls of the chamber are removable and allow the acoustic reverberation time to be adjusted to simulate different room acoustics. The control room next to the acoustic chamber includes a large, 4-foot-by-8-foot acoustic window and an inert acoustic door facing the acoustic chamber. Up to 16 channels of audio can be carried in or out of the chamber to the control room. Experiments to be conducted in the Multimedia Systems Laboratory include blind source separation, deconvolution and dereverberation. Several of the undergraduate courses in electrical engineering use sound and music to motivate system-level design and signal processing applications. The Multimedia Systems Laboratory can be used in these activities to develop data sets for use in classroom experiments and laboratory projects for students to complete.
Wireless Systems Laboratory
This laboratory contains an array of infrastructure for experimentation across a number of wireless frequency bands, platforms and environments for research and instruction in lab-based courses on wireless communications and networking. The infrastructure includes 1) state-of-the-art test equipment for repeatability, control and observability of wireless channels, including complex channel emulators, fixed and mobile spectrum analyzers, wide-band oscilloscopes, and signal generators; 2) a wide range of reprogrammable wireless testbeds that operate from 400 MHz to 6 GHz for IEEE 802.11, cellular, and Bluetooth network and protocol development; and 3) diverse mobile phones and tablets that enable participatory sensing, context-aware applications and large-scale deployment in the field. The in-lab infrastructure is also enhanced by multiple outdoor antennas deployed on campus buildings and buses for understanding real wireless channels.
Semiconductor Processing Cleanroom
The 2,800 square-foot cleanroom complex consists of a 2,400 square-foot class 10,000 cleanroom and a separate class 1,000 lithography area of 400 square feet, which is located in the Jerry R. Junkins Engineering Building. A partial list of equipment in this laboratory includes acid and solvent hoods, photoresist spinners, two contact mask aligners, a thermal evaporator, a plasma asher, a plasma etcher, a turbo-pumped methane hydrogen reactive ion etcher, a four-target sputtering system, a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition reactor, a diffusionpumped four pocket e-beam evaporator, an ellipsometer, and profilometers. Other etcher and four-tube diffusion furnace. The cleanroom is capable of processing silicon, compound semiconductors and piezo materials for microelectronic, photonic and nanotechnology devices.
Submicron Grating Laboratory
This laboratory is dedicated to holographic grating fabrication and has the capability of sub tenth-micron lines and spaces. Equipment includes a floating air table, an argon ion laser (ultraviolet lines) and an Atomic Force Microscope. This laboratory is used to make photonic devices with periodic features such as distributing feedback, distributing Bragg reflector, grating-out coupled and photonic crystal semiconductor lasers.
Photonic Devices Laboratory
This laboratory is dedicated to characterizing the optical and electrical properties of photonic devices. Equipment includes an optical spectrum analyzer, an optical multimeter, visible and infrared cameras, an automated laser characterization system for edge-emitting laser, a manual probe test system for surface-emitting lasers, a manual probe test system for edge-emitting laser die and bars, and a near- and far-field measurement system.
Photonics Simulation Laboratory
This laboratory has specific computer programs that have been developed and continue to be developed for modeling and designing semiconductor lasers and optical waveguides, couplers and switches. These programs include WAVEGUIDE (calculates near-field, far-field, and effective indices of dielectric waveguides and semiconductor lasers with up to 500 layers, and each layer can contain gain or loss), GAIN (calculates the gain as a function of energy, carrier density and current density for strained and unstrained quantum wells for a variety of material systems), GRATING (uses the Floquet Bloch approach and the boundary element method to calculate reflection, transmission and outcoupling of dielectric waveguides and laser structures with any number of layers), and FIBER (calculates the fields, effective index, group velocity and dispersion for fibers with a circularly symmetric index of refraction profiles). Additional software is under development of model the modulation characteristics of photonic devices.
Photonic Architectures Laboratory
This laboratory is a fully equipped optomechanical and electrical prototyping facility, supporting the activities of faculty and graduate students in experimental and analytical tasks. The lab is ideally suited for the packaging, integration and testing of devices, modules and prototypes of optical systems. It has three large vibration isolated tables, a variety of visible and infrared lasers, single element 1-D and 2-D detector arrays, and a large complement of optical and optomechanical components and mounting devices. In addition, the laboratory has extensive data acquisition and analysis equipment, including an IEEE 1394 Fire-Wire-capable image capture and processing workstation, specifically designed to evaluate the electrical and optical characteristics of smart pixel devices and FSOI fiber-optic modules. Support electronics hardware includes various test instrumentation, such as arbitrary waveform generators and a variety of CAD tools for optical and electronic design, including optical ray trace and finite difference time domain software.