Kevin A. Williams

"Photonic integrated circuits are critical enablers for the modern internet and will enable a host of low-energy, high-speed, high-precision solutions for imaging, sensing, metrology and beyond."

Kevin Williams is a Full Professor and Chair of the Photonic Integration research group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His key fields of expertise include photonic integrated circuits, semiconductor lasers and their application in communications and sensing. Kevin’s research group explores the scaling properties of photonic circuits, enabling faster and more energy-efficient components and circuits.

The group builds on its know-how in active-passive monolithic InP integration, creating circuits with lasers, amplifiers, energy-efficient quantum well modulators, detectors, power splitters, filters and more all on the same chip. This is addressed within three main themes: Generic integration – a methodology for enabling many different circuits using the same platform technology and an important vehicle for researching and validating the latest photonic devices and processes.  Heterogeneous and hybrid integration – the technologies for combining and co-designing photonic components and circuits with Silicon Electronics and dielectric materials, Integrated nano-photonics – using InP membranes on Silicon for the miniaturization of components and the leveraging of sub-wavelength photonic structures in circuits.  Kevin teaches courses in design, electronics and photonics.

Kevin Williams graduated in Electronic Engineering from the University of Sheffield and received his PhD from the School of Physics at the University of Bath in 1995.  He subsequently moved to the University of Bristol where he was awarded a Royal Society university research fellowship to study high speed and high power semiconductor lasers. In 2001, he moved to the University of Cambridge where he was also appointed a Fellow and lecturer at Churchill College Cambridge. He moved to the Electro-optic Communications group at TU/e in 2006 after receiving an EC Marie Curie Chair award. In 2011, he received a Vici award from the Dutch NWO to perform research into large-scale high-performance photonic integrated circuits.

He is presently leading the Photonic Integration group at the Institute of Photonic Integration (formerly known as the COBRA research institute). He has recently chaired the European Conference on Integrated Optics 2017 and serves as the Primary Guest Editor for the JSTQE special issue on InP integration photonics in 2018.