ECE Seminar, Milos Popovic

ECE Seminar, Milos Popovic Milos Popovic University of Colorado Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Faculty Host: Siddharth Ramachandran Light refreshments will be available outside of PHO 404 at 10:45 am. Photonic Device Design from the Complex Plane to the Microprocessor: Keeping Information, Energy and Entropy Under Control Abstract: Four decades on from the pioneering first steps at Bell Labs, microphotonics is at a transition from a few components to large-scale integrated systems on chip. In the near term, this can address severe bottlenecks seen in complex digital electronic systems – through integration with relatively simple but efficient photonic systems. In the longer term, tight integration and control means complex passive, active and nonlinear photonic structures enabling novel functions will become practical and may enable a new generation of integrated systems-on-chip for analog signal processing, computation, metrology and sensing. In the first part of the talk, Prof. Popović will describe work that bucked the trend of tailoring fabrication to design, instead pursuing a “design for manufacture” philosophy to photonic device innovation within fixed advanced-node CMOS microelectronics technology. This work enabled millions of transistors and thousands of photonic devices to coexist side-by-side for the first time, produced efficient electronic-photonic systems including record-energy optical transmitters, receivers and links, and resulted in the demonstration of the first microprocessor that communicates using light, with significant implications for computer architecture. In the second part, Popović will talk about example complex photonic device concepts that expose and address fundamental challenges and apparent limitations in optical signal processing. Popović will discuss the fundamental limits of modulators and breaking their speed-energy tradeoff; and about the “entropy pump”, a nonlinear photonic device designed to passively manipulate the coherence of light, and, for example, denoise laser light with high efficiency. With complex integration enabling control, such complex or sensitive photonic “circuits” could enable a new level of capabilities for a next generation of optical signal processors. Biography: Miloš Popović is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and GE/Donnelly Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his B.Sc.E. in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s University, Canada in 1999, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 and 2007. His research interests include first-principles theory and design of integrated photonic devices and circuits, CMOS photonics integration, nano-optomechanical devices based on light forces, mechanical motion and acoustic wave engineering, and nonlinear and quantum integrated photonics. He is author or coauthor of over 25 patents and 150 journal and conference papers. In 2012, he was named a Fellow of the David & Lucile Packard Foundation. He is co-founder and advisor at Ayar Labs. http://www.bu.edu/ece/files/2016/02/MilošPopovićFlyerMed2-01.jpg