Attend In Person or Virtually

Semiconductor chip technology faces new challenges with the end of Moore’s Law, but also new opportunities in emerging technologies like AI, 5G/6G wireless, autonomous vehicles and IoT, the “metaverse”, and quantum computing.  Recent advances have shown that photonics could have a fundamental place in the future of CMOS semiconductor chip technology—across computation, communication and sensing.  It can unlock vast increases in performance, but also unleash diverse new “derivative” capabilities and applications.  A key barrier has been the maturity, compatibility and design-flow disconnect between basic, “applied physics” device research in photonics and scaled state-of-the-art CMOS manufacturing used in complex (electronic) systems-on-chip relevant to all of the above applications.

In this talk, I will describe my vision for and work on developing photonic device technology that is integrable in state-of-the-art volume manufacturing CMOS platforms, developing CMOS platforms for monolithic electronics-photonics integration, and enabling new application-driven systems-on-chip using these platforms through cross-disciplinary collaborative efforts.  This has led to the world’s first microprocessor with photonic I/O (Nature 2015), field-leading commercial monolithic platforms (Nature 2018; GF 2022), and an industry-leading startup company in optical I/O, Ayar Labs (2015-).  The concurrent devices/platforms/systems-on-chip+applications research, design for manufacturing approach and systems-to-components design philosophy are also central to my current research efforts on future CMOS systems-on-chip to enable superconducting-electronics-based supercomputers; quantum networks for scaling quantum computers; computational beamformer SoCs including for astronomical or earth-sensing spectrometers, imaging lidar for intelligence, self-driving vehicles, mobiles, and AR/VR; and high-performance MIMO RF arrays for 5G/6G wireless systems.  I will describe some of these efforts, show how first-principles photonic device innovation enables system-on-chip and application research, and give my view of the potential impact of this work both industrially and on other branches of electrical engineering research.