Simar Saini, PEng

Simarjeet Saini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2001 under the guidance of Professor Mario Dagenais. Professor Saini’s Ph.D. thesis was on design and development of a new platform technology for monolithic integration of photonic devices called Passive Active Resonant Coupler (PARC). The resulting technology led to the foundation of a start-up company called Covega Corporation in Jessup, Maryland. Professor Saini worked as the Lead Optoelectronics Device Engineer at Covega and later, as a Lead Applications Engineer. He led the design and development of Covega’s single angled facet chips, semiconductor optical amplifiers and high power lasers.

In August 2004, Professor Saini co-founded Altanet Communications, a start-up company that focused on ethernet based metro area networks with less than 5 ms restoration time using intelligence in the optical domain.

Professor Saini’s research interests include : optoelectronics components for datacom and telecom, high speed optical networks, tunable mid-IR lasers, nanophotonics chem-bio sensors, and microwave photonics. He hold 5 US patents and has 5 more in various stages of application, of which 3 have already been commercialized.

• Monolithic Integration of photonics devices, Optoelectronics components for datacom and telecom, High speed optical networks, Tunable mid-IR lasers, Nanophotonics Chem-Bio Sensors, Microwave photonics, Antennas, Microwaves & Photonics, Water, Nanotechnology

• 2001, Doctorate Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, United States
• 1996, Bachelor of Technology Electronics and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

• ECE 106 - Electricity and Magnetism
  • Taught in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
• ECE 375 - Electromagnetic Fields and Waves
  • Taught in 2018, 2020, 2021
• ECE 672 - Optoelectronic Devices
  • Taught in 2023
• NE 241 - Electromagnetism
  • Taught in 2023

* Only courses taught in the past 5 years are displayed.

• Kohandani R., and Saini S.S., Extracting optical absorption characteristics from semiconductor nanowire arrays, Nanotechnology, Volume 33, Canada, 2022.
• Singh H., Saini S.S., and Lakshminarayanan V., Rapid classification of glaucomatous fundus images, Journal of the Optical Society of America A: Optics and Image Science, and Vision, Volume 38, 765-774, Canada, 2021.
• Singh H., Sridhar A., and Saini S.S., Ultra-Low-Cost Self-Referencing Multispectral Detector for Non-Destructive Measurement of Fruit Quality, Food Analytical Methods, Volume 13, 1879-1893, Canada, 2020.
• Kohandani R., and Saini S.S., Self-Referencing Plasmonic Array Sensors, Plasmonics, Volume 15, 1359-1368, Canada, 2020.
• Dhindsa N., Kohandani R., and Saini S.S., Length dependent optical characteristics analysis for semiconductor nanowires, Nanotechnology, Volume 31, United States, 2020.
• Saini S.S., Sridhar A., and Ahluwalia K., Smartphone optical sensors, Optics and Photonics News, Volume 30, 34-41, Canada, 2019.
• Khodadad I., Nelson-Fitzpatrick N., Burcham K., Hajian A., and Saini S.S., Electron beam lithography using fixed beam moving stage, Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B: Nanotechnology and Microelectronics, Volume 35, Canada, 2017.
• Dhindsa N., and Saini S.S., Top-down fabricated tapered GaAs nanowires with sacrificial etching of the mask, Nanotechnology, Volume 28, Canada, 2017.
• Priya G., Kalra S., Dardi I.K., Saini S., Aggarwal S., Singh R., Kaur H., Singh G., Talwar V., Singh P., Saini B.J.S., Julka S., Chawla R., Bajaj S., and Singh D., Diabetes care: Inspiration from Sikhism, Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Volume 21, 453-459, India, 2017.
• Dhindsa N., Walia J., and Saini S.S., A platform for colorful solar cells with enhanced absorption, Nanotechnology, Volume 27, Canada, 2016.