AI hardware needs are today the main driver of semiconductor industry processor chip developments and foundry progress, while quantum computing hardware is seeing unprecedented investment and interest. A critical need and missing need in computing of all kinds is movement of information, which now requires sophisticated optical interconnects. Such interconnects have provided the impetus for the development of advanced foundry platforms for electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs). I will talk about the progress and applications of emerging capabilities in advanced electronic-photonic ICs.

I will review work carried out through my research group and through silicon-valley startup Ayar Labs on developing advanced-node 300mm CMOS platforms for monolithic electronics-photonics integration in commercial foundries. I will also describe using these platforms to develop classical, cryogenic and quantum interconnects on chip, and photonic sensing apertures. These platforms have allowed EPICs and systems on chip (SoCs) of unprecedented complexity and improved sensitivity. In the talk, I will describe the latest developments at Ayar Labs on Terabit scale I/O from a single processor package. I’ll talk about university research on 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, and will summarize ongoing efforts on CMOS electronic-photonic quantum systems-on-chip (epQSoCs) for photonic quantum networks. Last, I will highlight recent research on efficient components, for example progress on a novel integrated photonic aperture, the serpentine optical phased array. One promising application is as a spectrometer design that improves over both bulk and integrated spectrometers by several orders of magnitude in key metrics such as resolving power and system volume. Photonic integrated circuits are at the brink of possible major impact in the semiconductor industry – for now, the first emerging commercial applications are optical interconnects, but it looks as though the semiconductor industry is starting to “see the light”.