12/04/2025
By Amanda Vozzo
Date: Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025
Time: 4 - 5 p.m.
Location: Olsen 503
Robert M. Weikle II, Professor, Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will give a talk on "Heterogeneous Integration and Micromachining Technologies for the Development of Terahertz Devices, Components and Instruments.”
Abstract: Terahertz electronics has been a topic of research and development for many years, motivated traditionally by the technological needs of the radio astronomy and remote sensing scientific communities. Over the past decade, this field has experienced dramatic growth and interest from academic researchers and federal agencies, as well as from industry. This interest has arisen, in part, from funding initiatives from the federal government, but is also largely due to the establishment of a commercial infrastructure that has made test and measurement instrumentation broadly available to the engineers and scientists working at these frequencies. Moreover, the emergence of CMOS as a submillimeter-wave technology has expanded access to this spectral region by providing circuit designers with a platform for realizing terahertz circuits without need for specialized fabrication facilities or processes.
This presentation will focus on two major efforts at the University of Virginia that are aimed at broadening the technology base for both terahertz system implementation and terahertz metrology. These include (1) the development of a direct-contact probe technology that permits on-wafer scattering-parameter characterization and measurement of planar integrated devices at frequencies to 1 THz and beyond, and (2) the establishment of processing technologies that permit fabrication of highly-integrated submillimeter-wave diode-based circuits, such as heterodyne receivers and frequency multipliers, that are based on heterogeneous integration of III-V semiconductor devices with silicon. The technical foundation for each of these efforts is micromachining of silicon that allow the formation of mechanically-robust and low-loss membrane carriers to support terahertz devices and circuitry.
Bio: Robert M. Weikle II received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and physics from Rice University, Houston, TX, in 1986 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and 1992, respectively. During the 1993 academic year, he was a postdoctoral research scientist at Chalmers University in Göteborg, Sweden.
In 1993, Weikle joined the faculty of the University of Virginia where he is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics. His research group focuses on research of submillimeter electronics, heterogeneous integration and fabrication, terahertz devices, high-frequency instrumentation and metrology, and quasi-optical techniques for millimeter-wave power combining and imaging.
Colloquium sponsored by the Submillimeter-wave Technology Laboratory at UMass Lowell