Abstract
The advent of transistors and CMOS integrated circuits revolutionized our world. Today, digital and analog circuits in large-scale integration allow signal processing at extremely complicated scales. While CMOS transistors have increasing become faster thanks to process scaling, their bandwidth is still limited for several applications in computing, communication and switching.
The advent of silicon photonics over the last 15 years now provides a platform to design photonic circuits with large-scale integration leveraging CMOS fabrication knowledge. Compared to CMOS electronics, photonics can provide larger bandwidth and a carrier frequency that is orders of magnitude higher. However, implementing gain, non-linearity and complex signal processing are some of the serious limitations that silicon-photonics integrated circuits face today.
This talk will first give a quick overview of photonic devices and integrated circuits, drawing several analogies from CMOS electronics circuits. Next, different design challenges and opportunities for leveraging them together will be described, with upcoming applications in high-speed interconnects, optical switching inside datacenters, machine-learning co-processors, and low-cost biosensors.
Bio
Sudip Shekhar received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 2003. He received his MS. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2003 and 2008, respectively.
From 2008 to 2013, he was with the Circuits Research Laboratory, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR, USA, where he worked on high-speed link architectures. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His current research interests include circuits for high-speed electrical and optical interfaces, frequency synthesizers, and wireless transceivers.
Dr. Shekhar was a recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Fellowship in 2007–2008, Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowships in 2006–2008, the Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2007, the Young Alumni Achiever Award by IIT Kharagpur in 2019, the IEEE Transactions on Circuit and Systems Darlington Best Paper Award in 2010 and a co-recipient of IEEE Radio-Frequency IC Symposium Best Student Paper Award in 2015. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated by the UW Electrical Engineering Department to the UW College of Engineering’s 2008 Research Innovator Award. He serves on the technical program committee of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) and Optical Interconnects (OI) Conference.
