Abstract: It has never left, yet it feels like “computing is back”. AI hardware needs are driving semiconductor industry processor developments and foundry progress, while quantum computing hardware is seeing unprecedented investment and interest. A critical need and missing technology in computing of all kinds are optical interconnects. I will provide an update on work started while I was at CU Boulder, and continued through CU-startup Ayar Labs and at Boston University on developing electronic-photonic integrated circuits and systems, and using them to develop classical, cryogenic and quantum interconnects. This has included developing advanced-node 300mm CMOS platforms for monolithic electronics-photonics integration in commercial foundries, and demonstrating photonic devices and systems-on-chip (SoCs). In the talk, I will describe the latest developments at Ayar Labs on Terabit scale I/O from a single processor package, and university research demonstrations of high-performance photonic devices in CMOS platforms. I’ll also talk about cryogenic (4K) photonic data links that could address the I/O bottleneck of superconducting electronics and enable new future supercomputing platforms well suited to AI. Last, I’ll talk about efforts on electronic-photonic quantum systems-on-chip (epQSoCs) for photonic quantum networks. Photonic integrated circuits are at the brink of possible major impact in the semiconductor industry – but for now, they’ve just been the missing links.

Bio: Milos Popovic is Co-Founder and Senior Technical Architect at Ayar Labs, a company developing photonic in-package I/O based on technology developed in his university research group. He is on sabbatical leave from his post as Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, and Principal Investigator in the BU Photonics Center where he leads a silicon photonics research group. Milos received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s University, Canada, and his MS and PhD from MIT. He was an Assistant Professor at CU Boulder’s ECEE department from 2010 to 2016. His interests are in the theory and design of novel integrated photonic devices and systems, and in the monolithic integration of photonics and CMOS electronics. He is an author or co-author of over 40 patents and 250 journal and conference papers, and is a 2012 Fellow of the Packard Foundation.