Photonic-Electronic Co-Design: The Power of Synergy

For decades, silicon integrated electronic circuits have been the cornerstone of advancements in communication, computation, and data storage systems. Despite spectacular achievements, the ever-increasing need for higher-speed and lower-power data transfer and processing has challenged electronics. Specifically, parasitic components, substrate and transmission line loss, coupled with the slowdown of Moore’s Law, make high-frequency signal processing and generation formidable tasks. Silicon photonics leverages the mature silicon foundries as well as large optical bandwidth, low-loss signal transmission, multi-dimensional data parallelism, and immunity to electromagnetic interference to realize communication and computation systems with unrivaled performance. Moreover, co-/hybrid integration of photonics and electronics has played a pivotal role in developing more efficient systems with small footprints.

In this seminar, I will present some of my work that demonstrates how the synergy between these two domains can result in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I will cover applications including scalable photonic neural networks and their training for high-speed data classification, microwave imaging using low-loss photonic integrated circuits, and wideband and high-resolution optical frequency synthesis using CMOS-integrated electro-optic phase-locked loops. This emerging area has just taken off, presenting abundant research and collaboration opportunities within academia and with industry; I will outline some of these exciting future directions in the talk.

Speaker: Farshid Ashtiana, Nokia Bell Labs