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Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging

Ultra-thin meta-optics have the potential to make imaging systems lighter and thinner than ever. Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for a wide range of applications.

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Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging Banner

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways.

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UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality Banner

UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian receives AFOSR YIP award for quantum computing research

UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian has been awarded a three-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The grant will enable Mouradian to investigate using optical forces and long ion chains for quantum computing.

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UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian receives AFOSR YIP award for quantum computing research Banner

Print issues of The Integrator are now available!

Print issues of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship, annual publication, are now available! The magazine highlights the UW ECE community and covers stories about extraordinary students and their achievements, faculty research and discoveries, alumni news, events and more.

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Print issues of The Integrator are now available! Banner

UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong pushes boundaries in art and technology

UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong (BSEE '89) has had a fulfilling career combining his engineering background with visual arts, most notably with Gemini A.I., an AI-powered robot that creates paintings using traditional Chinese art techniques.

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UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong pushes boundaries in art and technology Banner

A laser printer for photonic chips

A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li has invented a way to print and reconfigure photonic integrated circuits (microchips) using a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer.

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A laser printer for photonic chips Banner

News + Events

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/ultra-flat-optics/
Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging

Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging

Ultra-thin meta-optics have the potential to make imaging systems lighter and thinner than ever. Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for a wide range of applications.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/our-next-reality/
UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/the-integrator-2023-2024-prints/
Print issues of The Integrator are now available!

Print issues of The Integrator are now available!

Print issues of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship, annual publication, are now available! The magazine highlights the UW ECE community and covers stories about extraordinary students and their achievements, faculty research and discoveries, alumni news, events and more.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/uw-ece-assistant-professor-sara-mouradian-receives-afosr-yip-award-for-quantum-computing-research/
https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/a-laser-printer-for-photonic-chips/
A laser printer for photonic chips

A laser printer for photonic chips

A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li has invented a way to print and reconfigure photonic integrated circuits (microchips) using a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/victor-wong/
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                    [post_content] => By Anna Wirth-Singh | UW Department of Physics

[caption id="attachment_33938" align="alignright" width="550"]Hand wearing a purple glove holding a conventional refractive lens and a wafer disc containing ultra-thin metaoptics Ultra-thin meta-optics have the potential to make imaging systems lighter and thinner than ever. Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for applications ranging from consumer electronics to thermal sensing and night vision. Shown above, a side view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics held above a conventional refractive lens. The meta-optics were developed by a multi-institutional research team led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption]

Long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) imaging holds critical significance across many applications, from consumer electronics to defense and national security. It finds applications in night vision, remote sensing, and long-range imaging. However, the conventional refractive lenses employed in these imaging systems are bulky and heavy, which is undesirable for almost all applications. Compounding this issue is the fact that many LWIR refractive lenses are crafted from expensive and limited-supply materials, such as germanium.

The next generation of optical systems demands lenses that are not only lighter and thinner than ever before, but also uphold uncompromising image quality. This demand has fueled a surge of efforts to develop ultra-thin sub-wavelength diffractive optics, known as meta-optics. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale nanopillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. While conventional refractive lenses are close to a centimeter thick, meta-optics are about 500 microns thick, which dramatically reduces the overall thickness of the optics.

However, one challenge with meta-optics is strong chromatic aberrations. That is, light of different wavelengths interacts with the structure in different ways, and the result is typically a lens that cannot simultaneously focus light of different wavelengths in the same focal plane. Largely because of this issue, meta-optics have not yet fully replaced their refractive counterparts despite the benefits in size and weight reduction. In particular, the area of LWIR meta-optics is relatively unexplored compared to visible wavelength meta-optics, and the potential advantages of meta-optics over conventional refractive lenses are significant given the unique and extensive applications of this wavelength range.

[caption id="attachment_33941" align="alignleft" width="300"]Arka Majumdar headshot UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Ryan Hoover.[/caption]

Now, in a new paper published in Nature Communications, a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar, has introduced a new design framework termed “MTF-engineering.” The modulation transfer function, or MTF, describes how well a lens maintains image contrast as a function of spatial frequency. This framework addresses the challenges associated with broadband meta-optics to design and experimentally demonstrate thermal imaging with meta-optics in laboratory and real-world settings. The team built upon already successful inverse design techniques by developing a framework which optimizes both the pillar shape and the global arrangement simultaneously. UW ECE-affiliated team members included recent alumni Luocheng Huang (the paper’s lead author) and Zheyi Han, postdoctoral researchers Saswata Mukherjee, Johannes Fröch, and Quentin Tanguy as well as UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer, who is the director of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems at the UW.

 

Leveraging artificial intelligence and a new inverse design framework

[caption id="attachment_33951" align="alignright" width="550"]A hand wearing a white glove holding a fabricated disk containing several small discs, which contain metaoptics. Below this photo are two grayscale photos of nanopillars. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale pillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. (Above) A full view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics. (Below) Scanning electron microscope images of the nanopillars contained within the team’s meta-optics. These meta-optics contain both complex light scatterers (left) and simple scatterers (right). Photos provided by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption] One key innovation in the research team’s approach is the use of artificial intelligence — a deep neural network (DNN) model — to map between pillar shape and phase. In an inverse design process for large area optics, it is not computationally feasible to simulate how the light interacts with each pillar at each iteration. To solve this problem, the authors simulated a large library of nanopillars (also called “meta-atoms”) and used the simulated data to train a DNN. The DNN enabled a quick mapping between scatterer and phase in the optimization loop, allowing the inverse design of large-area optics containing millions of micron-scale pillars. Another key innovation in this work is the figure of merit (FoM), leading to the framework being termed “MTF-engineering.” In inverse design, one defines an FoM and computationally optimizes the structure or arrangement to maximize the FoM. However, it is often not intuitive why the produced result is optimal. For this work, the authors leveraged their expertise in meta-optics to define an FoM that is intuitive. Majumdar explained, “The figure of merit is related to the area under the MTF curve. The idea here is to pass as much information as possible through the lens, which is captured in the MTF. Then, combined with a light computational backend, we can achieve a high-quality image.” He continued, “The figure of merit reflects what we intuitively know about optics. This particular FoM is optimized when all the wavelengths perform equally well, thus constraining our optics to have uniform performance over the specified wavelengths without explicitly defining uniformity as an optimization criterion.” This approach, combining intuition from meta-optics and a light computational backend, significantly improves performance compared to simple metalenses. The authors fabricated their designed optics from a single silicon wafer, which is promising for future applications involving germanium-free LWIR imaging systems. While acknowledging that there is still room for improvement to achieve imaging quality comparable to commercial refractive lens systems, this work represents a significant step toward that goal. The researchers have generously made their MTF-engineering framework, named “metabox,” available online via GitHub, inviting others to use it for designing their own meta-optics. The research team expressed excitement about the potential works that may emerge from the utilization of metabox in the broader scientific community. This article is an adaptation of a blog post available at Springer Nature Research Communities. For more information about the research described above read, “Broadband thermal imaging using meta-optics” in Nature Communications or contact UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. [post_title] => Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ultra-flat-optics [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 09:14:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 16:14:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33933 [menu_order] => 1 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33767 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-02-29 09:22:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-29 17:22:53 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33785" align="alignright" width="575"]Alvin Graylin in a business suit, sitting at a table UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways. He also is scheduled to be the honored guest speaker at this year’s UW ECE Graduation ceremony.[/caption] UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is looking ahead. And what he sees coming in technology development over the next decade has given him reasons for both hope and concern, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and extended reality, or XR, which encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality environments. “We’re in a tenuous time in this society, where AI and XR is growing so quickly that it will be very difficult for society to cope, from cultural, economic and geopolitical perspectives,” Graylin said. “The decisions that we make as a species in the next five to 10 years about how we handle this technology will impact the next thousand years in terms of how humanity will progress.” That last statement may sound hard to believe, but Graylin is an influential technology pioneer, executive, entrepreneur, and thought leader who got his start in the semiconductor industry and has well over 30 years’ experience creating, developing, and delivering products based on AI and XR. His career is international in scope, spanning the U.S., China, and Taiwan, and it includes leadership roles at companies in all three countries. Currently, Graylin is the Global VP of Development for HTC, a Taiwanese consumer electronics company that is a world leader in the development of virtual reality and augmented reality platforms. Part of his job at HTC entails serving as co-head of the ViveX VR Accelerator, which is the company’s global program for investing in startups at the intersection of virtual reality, augmented reality, AI and 5G technologies. He is also vice-chairman of the Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance in China and president of the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance, which brings XR investment opportunities to its member corporations and venture capitalists.
“We’re in a tenuous time in this society, where AI and XR is growing so quickly that it will be very difficult for society to cope, from cultural, economic and geopolitical perspectives.” — UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin
Graylin’s entrepreneurial and leadership experience is extensive. He has founded four venture-backed startups in areas ranging from AI-based natural language search to big-data AI analytics across China and the U.S. As an investor, he has been involved in funding over 100 startups. He is a much sought-after speaker, who is frequently featured at leading international conferences and in the media on topics relating to AI, XR, entrepreneurship, and for his insights on the Chinese market. He also is scheduled to be the honored guest speaker at this year’s UW ECE Graduation ceremony. Now, Graylin is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of AI and XR technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways.

Our Next Reality

[caption id="attachment_33789" align="alignright" width="350"]Our Next Reality book cover Graylin’s book, “Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse will Reshape the World,” will be released through Amazon Kindle on March 5, Audible on March 6, and it will be available in print June 4 this year.[/caption] “Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse will Reshape the World” explores 13 questions about AI and the metaverse (today’s internet built out as an XR environment), which Graylin debates with his co-author Louis Rosenberg, who was an early pioneer of virtual and augmented reality development and is a longtime AI researcher. It also includes a foreword by renowned author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and section contributions from respected industry thought leaders. The book already has received several favorable reviews from those in the vanguard of science and technology, such as Ray Kurzweil, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Dava Newman. Graylin said that he and Rosenberg wrote the book with three audiences in mind: government leaders and policy makers, those working in the AI and XR industries, and the next generation of scientists and engineers. “I’ve created and brought to market a number of technology products that have impacted hundreds of millions of people,” Graylin said. “Writing this book is a way of sharing some of my experience and knowledge, and hopefully, it might inspire a young person to do the right thing when it comes to AI and XR.” Graylin said that he and Rosenberg designed the book to help better inform those in government who are involved with incentivizing and regulating the AI and XR industries but who might not have a scientific or technical background. For those working in AI and XR, Graylin hopes the book convinces them to put in safeguards when designing products to protect end-users and the public. The book also emphasizes the importance of ethical technology development. Graylin said that in addition to motivating the next generation of scientists and engineers to consider the importance of ethics when it comes to AI and XR, he would like to inspire them to realize that they will be entering a world through the AI-powered metaverse that will be more amazing than anything people living today, or prior generations, have ever seen.
“I am optimistic, and I feel like we have the potential to get to a good long-term outcome when it comes to AI and XR development, but only if we have the determination to do the right thing and consciously work at it all along the way.” — UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin
In line with his forward-looking viewpoint, Graylin also chose to write the book for a fourth audience that hasn’t yet come into existence — an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a sentient AI system that possesses intelligence equal to or greater than that of a human. “There is a small section of the book that is written for an AGI learning agent, so that if it scans this information, it can see what we are trying to do,” Graylin said. “This information, hopefully, will help the AGI see its position as our ‘descendant’ and motivate it to treat human beings as its ancestors, in a positive way.” Graylin and his co-author see the confluence of AI and the metaverse as a game-changer, capable of revolutionizing the education system, government, and almost every industry in existence. Both are concerned about the speed of AI development today. “If AI continues to progress at the rate we’re currently seeing, it will be able to replace most of the labor out there in about a decade, whether it’s cognitive or manual labor. It means that our relationship with our jobs and occupations will be drastically changed,” Graylin said. “In the past, when we’ve had other industrial revolutions, they’ve happened over decades. That was enough time to allow society to adapt and adjust. But this revolution will happen so quickly that it will be very difficult for societies to adjust and create new outlets for their people’s energy.” In the book, Graylin talks about the potential of the AI-powered metaverse to create purpose and opportunities for people around the world, especially for those who have less access to real-world opportunities. However, both he and Rosenberg are concerned that the current, hyper-competitive model between companies and nations for AI development is counterproductive, and in the long-term, dangerous. “Essentially, if one company or one country wins this race, we all lose, as a society and a world community,” Graylin said. “The key is that we cannot let this race start, because if it starts, somebody will win, and whoever the winner is will be too tempted to use the dominant AI technology they have developed in selfish ways.” As an antidote to this possible outcome, and to prepare for the coming convergence of AI and the metaverse, Graylin recommends more international cooperation in the design, development, and implementation of AI and XR as well as cooperative effort creating ethical and safety guidelines for these powerful technologies. He said that working to incorporate diverse representation of people and ideas into AI systems is also very important, as this will help expand system knowledge and perspective, reducing biases and potential for harm. “I’m actually not afraid of a super intelligent AGI system being developed because, by definition, that system will have enough knowledge and experience built-in to make wise, compassionate decisions,” Graylin said. “I’m afraid of the young and impetuous AI system that has been fed a limited, biased dataset but still has the power to have a real impact on human lives.” Graylin said that people need to be thoughtful about what data they are feeding to AI systems, and that scientists and engineers need to be careful about what tools they give AI systems access to — in a manner somewhat akin to raising children responsibly. “To be honest, I think we are creating our children, the next evolution of intelligence,” Graylin said. “I am optimistic, and I feel like we have the potential to get to a good long-term outcome when it comes to AI and XR development, but only if we have the determination to do the right thing and consciously work at it all along the way.”

Positive role models, UW connections

[caption id="attachment_33794" align="alignright" width="350"]UW Professor Emeritus Tom Furness is holding a virtual reality headset and standing next to Alvin Graylin in front of the HIT Lab Graylin with UW Professor Emeritus Tom Furness, who is holding a Vive Focus virtual reality headset. Furness is a pioneer in human interface technology and is well-known in the tech sector as the “Grandfather of Virtual Reality.”[/caption] To that end, Graylin is on the Science and Ethics Council at the Virtual World Society, which provides guidance for the responsible development and adoption of emerging technologies, working to ensure that they will benefit society as a whole. This organization was founded by Tom Furness, who is a Professor Emeritus in the industrial and systems engineering department at the UW and was a UW ECE adjunct professor during his tenure at the University. Furness is a pioneer in human interface technology and is well-known in the tech sector as the “Grandfather of Virtual Reality.” Graylin built his foundation in virtual reality research when he was an undergraduate student working with Furness in the Human Interface Technology Lab. He considers Furness to be a formative role model and today, a friend and colleague. “I’ve joined Tom’s organization to help him spread the message of how to utilize immersive technologies for creating a better society,” Graylin said. “I think that ties back into the questions and issues Louis and I have written about in our book.” Graylin noted that he has benefited over the years from positive, accomplished role models like Furness, both at the UW and within his own family. His father was a well-known artist in China and the U.S., and before he was born, his mother co-founded two leading ballet schools in the country — the Guangzhou and Shanghai School of Dance. The latter was for the premier ballet company in Beijing, China at the time. In the early 1980s, his parents fled oppression stemming from the Cultural Revolution in China and immigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. The family chose to settle in the Seattle area, and he and his brother, Will Graylin, followed parallel paths. Both showed an interest and aptitude for technology, both graduated from the UW, and later, MIT, and then went on to successful careers in the tech sector, becoming leaders in their respective fields. Most recently, the brothers spoke on a panel together at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, commonly known as CES. According to Graylin, his father instilled within him and his brother a deep sense of purpose. “My dad’s theory was that everyone is here on earth to contribute in some way, to make society and the world better, and that we should find a way to maximize whatever that impact is,” Graylin said. “He told me that I needed to find whatever it was that I was good at, so I could make the biggest contribution I could, so that the world would be a better place after I am gone. That has been my driving purpose since I was a child.” As one might imagine, with an inner purpose like that, Graylin was and is a hard worker. He said he has always held at least a part-time job since he was 10 years old. As an undergraduate at the UW, he built and sold computers to help finance his education. He also chose to study electrical engineering over aeronautics and aerospace engineering because he believed EE was more practical and served a broader market. That way, he thought he would have more potential to do what his father asked him to do, which was to maximize his impact in the world. At UW ECE, Graylin focused on studying virtual reality as applied to education markets and parallel processing computer architecture design applied to neural network AI applications. He said that he especially enjoyed his computer architecture course, and it was part of what brought him to his first full-time job at Intel after he graduated. Over the course of his career, Graylin has returned to UW ECE several times to give talks to students. He also has been an active alumnus, regularly participating in alumni events, and when his career was based in China, he was a member of the UW alumni club in both Shanghai and Beijing. “UW ECE provided a demanding, but well-balanced and well-structured education. I never felt like I didn’t have a resource that another school might have, and I didn’t feel limited in any way,” Graylin said. “It’s also nice to see the progress the UW has made over the last three decades. It’s definitely becoming a lot more recognized as a global powerhouse of education. It makes me proud to say I’m a UW ECE graduate.”

Moving into the next reality

[caption id="attachment_33798" align="alignright" width="550"]Three men sit in chairs on a stage in front of a screen at the 2024 CES. The man in the center, Alvin Graylin, holds a virtual reality headset. Alvin Graylin (center) shares the stage with his brother Will Graylin (right). The brothers spoke on a panel at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, commonly known as CES. Alvin Graylin is holding a Vive XR Elite headset. XR stands for “extended reality,” which encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality immersive technologies.[/caption] Now, after 18 years working in China, Graylin has moved back to Seattle. In addition to his day job at HTC, he is busy promoting the release of his new book, and he plans to spend more time with his two daughters — one who graduated from the UW last year and one who will graduate from the UW this year. Both of his daughters plan to stay in the Pacific Northwest. When asked what he would recommend for students interested in pursuing a career that blends AI with XR, Graylin said that there is no substitute for hands-on experience. “I think the key is that you have to go and do it,” Graylin said. “Go play with the tools, go play with the devices, go make something, versus just attending lectures and doing class projects.” He also advises students to make it a point to read as much as they can, both within and beyond the scope of their major, which he said can help students make connections between their focus area and the world around them. Graylin emphasized the value of entrepreneurial experience for those beginning their career, which he believes can provide knowledge outside the scope of a corporate job and can make any recent graduate a more well-rounded person. Overall, although he acknowledges the many challenges on the road ahead, Graylin remains optimistic and excited about the future for AI and XR and the opportunities these immersive technologies could provide for the next generation of scientists and engineers as well as the world at-large. “I believe that an AI-powered metaverse could allow us to get to a place where our basic needs will be satisfied as individuals and as a society, and it could enable us, over the next few hundred years, to solve mysteries of the universe that have perplexed us since the beginning of time,” Graylin said. “I think that could be a pretty amazing change in terms of purpose for people today. We can use the AI-powered metaverse to help people to think higher and encourage them to work toward fulfilling their destinies as intelligent beings.” Visit the Our Next Reality website for more information about Alvin Graylin’s new book. The website includes a link to “Our Next Reality AI,”  an OpenAI ChatGPT large language model that was customized by Graylin to be an expert at answering questions about the convergence of AI and immersive technologies.  [post_title] => UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => our-next-reality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-29 09:22:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-29 17:22:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33767 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33751 [post_author] => 36 [post_date] => 2024-02-14 15:42:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-14 23:42:31 [post_content] => Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE's annual magazine, which covers faculty, student and alumni news, research and more! The magazine is online and print copies are now available at the ECE front office.  The Integrator 2023- 2024 magazine [post_title] => Print issues of The Integrator are now available! [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-integrator-2023-2024-prints [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-15 10:39:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-15 18:39:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33751 [menu_order] => 3 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33637 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-02-21 08:40:13 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-21 16:40:13 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33638" align="alignright" width="600"]UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian headshot UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian (above) has been awarded a three-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, through its Young Investigator Program, or YIP. The grant will support work in Mouradian’s Scalable Quantum Research Lab, which aims to build, understand and control trapped ion quantum systems in order to develop useful and practical quantum technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption] UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian has been awarded a three-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, through its Young Investigator Program, or YIP. The grant will support work in Mouradian’s Scalable Quantum Research Lab, which aims to build, understand and control trapped ion quantum systems in order to develop useful and practical quantum technologies. Mouradian joins an elite group of investigators as one of only 48 scientists and engineers from across the nation that have been awarded a 2024 AFOSR YIP grant. These individuals have each demonstrated exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research relevant to the U.S. Air Force and national defense. “It’s an honor to receive this award and be part of such a prestigious group of talented investigators,” said Mouradian, who also is a member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and QuantumX at the UW. “It’s very exciting for both me and my students to know that our work is valued by the AFOSR and by the community.” Quantum computing and related technologies promise significant breakthroughs in sensing, communication, and computation along with exponential increases in speed for solving complex problems, with potential impact in areas such as pharmaceutical development, materials science, and cryptography. Quantum technologies also could fundamentally change the defense sector, providing new modes for secure communication and computational advantage. However, scientists and engineers still face many challenges before they can build a fault-tolerant computational architecture, which is required for quantum systems to be capable of solving real-world problems. Mouradian’s work is anticipated to strengthen AFOSR Quantum Information Sciences programs by building a foundation for future research into fault-tolerant quantum computation based on trapped ions.
The AFOSR YIP grant will enable us to investigate using optical forces and long ion chains for quantum computing, and I believe that there will be many more future applications for the technology we are developing. — UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian
Trapped ion quantum systems are considered by many, including Mouradian, to be one of the best options available for scaling up quantum computers to the level needed for practical applications. The AFOSR YIP grant will enable Mouradian and her research team to investigate ways of using optical forces generated by laser beams to control and stabilize long chains of trapped ions for quantum information processing. Mouradian’s team will conduct theoretical work with trapped ions and then validate their findings with experiments. A considerable portion of the team’s experimental effort will be spent on building a powerful optical system, which will enable flexible and stable quantum state control for long ion chains. The device uses “optical tweezers,” which employ optical forces to help partition ion chains on the fly to improve gate (circuit) fidelity, stabilize ion chains against high-energy collisions with background gas molecules, and improve the efficiency of cooling long ion chains in the presence of electric field noise. “We will be setting up a new component to our system — the optical laser beams that will provide the optical forces,” Mouradian said. “This is a new capability that only a handful of ion trap labs around the world have.” Work supported by the grant gets underway this spring. The research team includes students and scholars in Mouradian’s lab, including Ritika (Rithi) Anandwade, a graduate student in the physics department, who will fully dedicate her time to the project during the duration of the grant. Brant Bowers, a postdoctoral scholar in Mouradian’s lab, will be allocating about a quarter of his time to this work. The team also includes UW ECE doctoral students Hae Lim and Sean Garner, as well as a research assistant, Vikram Kaskyap, and UW ECE undergraduates Minh Anh Nguyen and Charlotte Epstein-O’Rourke and Lukshya Ganjoo, a UW undergraduate student in the mathematics department and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Mouradian anticipates training other UW graduate and undergraduate students as well on the new modeling and experimental techniques the group will be implementing. Looking ahead, Mouradian says that research supported by the AFOSR YIP grant will enable the field of quantum information science and technology to fully capitalize on the power of long chains of ions. She also believes that this work will help lay the foundation for more studies on optimal architectures for trapped-ion quantum information processing. According to Mouradian, future research in this area could explore optical forces that are modulated during the application of quantum gates (basic quantum circuits) to add to and enhance the current set of tools for quantum control. “The AFOSR YIP grant will enable us to investigate using optical forces and long ion chains for quantum computing, and I believe that there will be many more future applications for the technology we are developing,” Mouradian said. “I am very grateful to the AFOSR for their support, and I am looking forward to what we will be able to accomplish together.” Learn more about UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian and her research at the Scalable Quantum Research Lab website and in the article “Sara Mouradian — building quantum technologies for computing, communication and sensing.” [post_title] => UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian receives AFOSR YIP award for quantum computing research [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => uw-ece-assistant-professor-sara-mouradian-receives-afosr-yip-award-for-quantum-computing-research [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-26 08:48:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-26 16:48:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33637 [menu_order] => 5 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33559 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-01-25 08:47:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-01-25 16:47:10 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33561" align="alignright" width="525"]An illustration of a laser beam engraving a microchip in a black box frame, plus an inset showing the photonic chip circuitry A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li has invented a new way to print and reconfigure photonic integrated circuits (microchips) using a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer. This device could enable students and researchers to bypass expensive nanofabrication facilities and produce photonic integrated circuits almost anywhere. The technology also has possible industrial applications. Illustration by Haoquin Deng | UW ECE[/caption] Photonic integrated circuits are an important, next-wave technology. These sophisticated microchips hold the potential to substantially decrease costs and increase speed and efficiency for electronic devices across a wide range of application areas, including automotive technology, communications, healthcare, data storage, and computing for artificial intelligence. Photonic circuits use photons, fundamental particles of light, to move, store, and access information in much the same way that conventional electronic circuits use electrons for this purpose. Photonic chips are already in use today in advanced fiber-optic communication systems, and they are being developed for implementation in a broad spectrum of near-future technologies, including light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, for autonomous vehicles; light-based sensors for medical devices; 5G and 6G communication networks; and optical and quantum computing. Given the broad range of existing and future uses for photonic integrated circuits, access to equipment that can fabricate chip designs for study, research and industrial applications is also important. However, today’s nanofabrication facilities cost millions of dollars to construct and are well beyond the reach of many colleges, universities, and research labs. For those who can access a nanofabrication facility, at least a day must be reserved for the exacting and time-consuming lithographic process used to make these microchips. On top of that, if an error is made in design, or if the chip doesn’t work properly for some other reason, the faulty circuit must be discarded, the design adjusted, and a new chip fabricated. This often results in days or even weeks spent in the cleanroom. But now, as described in a new paper in Science Advances, a UW ECE-led research team has devised a way to bypass expensive nanofabrication facilities and produce photonic integrated circuits almost anywhere. The team has developed an innovative method in which these circuits can be written, erased, and modified by a laser writer into a thin film of phase-change material similar to what is used for recordable CDs and DVDs. This new process allows photonic integrated circuits to be constructed and reconfigured in a fraction of the time it would take at a nanofabrication lab.
"Using our method, photonic circuits that previously had to be fabricated in expensive and hard-to-access facilities now can be printed and reconfigured in labs, classrooms, and even garage workshops..." — UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li
The multi-university team was led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li, who is the Department’s associate chair for research, a member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and the senior author of the paper. “Photonics technology is on the horizon; therefore, we need to train or educate our students in this field. But for students to study and have hands-on experience with photonic circuits, currently, they need access to a multimillion-dollar facility,” Li said. “This new technology addresses that problem. Using our method, photonic circuits that previously had to be fabricated in expensive and hard-to-access facilities now can be printed and reconfigured in labs, classrooms, and even garage workshops, by a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer.”

Benefits for students, researchers and industry

[caption id="attachment_33566" align="alignright" width="525"]Researcher headshots From left to right: UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li, UW ECE graduate student Changming Fu, UW ECE graduate student Haoqin Deng. Photo of Mo Li by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption] Students aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from this new way of creating photonic integrated circuits. For researchers, this advance will enable a much quicker turnaround time for prototyping and testing out a new idea before booking valuable time in a nanofabrication facility. And for industrial applications, a big advantage of this method for producing photonic integrated circuits is reconfigurability. For example, companies could possibly use this technology to create reconfigurable optical connections in data centers, especially in systems that support artificial intelligence and machine learning, which would lead to cost savings and production efficiencies. Li’s research team included UW ECE graduate student Changming Wu, who is lead author of the paper, and, along with Li, came up with the idea for this novel way of building photonic integrated circuits. UW ECE graduate student Haoqin Deng also contributed to the effort. Their work is the latest result of a six-year line of research at the UW that includes advances in optical computing. It is also a continuation of a productive collaboration with Professors Ichiro Takeuchi and Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo and their students at the University of Maryland. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation. “Being able to write a whole photonic circuit using only one single step, without a complicated fabrication process, is really exciting. And the fact that we can make any modification to any part of the circuit in our own lab and rewrite and redo it is amazing,” Wu said. “It’s a matter of minutes versus a full, day-long process. It’s a huge relief to be able to finish the whole fabrication process within a few minutes instead of what often is several days or even a week.”

Improving performance, building a commercial device

The method the team developed has been proven to work, but it is still an early-stage concept. However, Li has filed a provisional patent application, and he has plans in progress to build a desktop laser writer for photonic integrated circuits. This printer could be sold at an affordable price and distributed widely to research labs and educational institutions around the world. He is also engaging with industry leaders to promote possible applications of this new technology in programmable photonic chips and reconfigurable optical networks. This laser printer for photonic chips will use a staging system that will move the substrate in a much more precise manner than in a traditional desktop printer. The team will be seeking ways to optimize its performance as they build a prototype. They also will be working on reducing optical loss in the phase-change material they are using through further research in material science and laser writing techniques. This will enable the printer to produce even more detailed and sophisticated circuits than what is currently possible. Li said that he and his research team were very excited about what lay ahead. “This technology can create the photonic circuitry you want, but it also can be added onto already-existing electronic circuitry. And because it is reconfigurable and reusable, it just opens many possibilities for students, researchers, and industry,” Li said. “What’s most exciting to me is that we’ll potentially have a huge impact on the field of photonics in disseminating this new tool and technology to the broader research community.” For more information about the research described in this article, read “Freeform direct-write and rewritable photonic integrated circuits in phase-change thin films” in Science Advances, or contact Professor Mo Li. [post_title] => A laser printer for photonic chips [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => a-laser-printer-for-photonic-chips [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-01-26 12:18:58 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-01-26 20:18:58 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33559 [menu_order] => 6 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33375 [post_author] => 36 [post_date] => 2024-02-02 10:32:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-02 18:32:41 [post_content] => [caption id="attachment_33432" align="alignright" width="584"] UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong (BSEE '89) has had a fulfilling career combining his engineering background with visual arts, most notably with A.I. Gemini, an AI-powered robot that creates paintings using traditional Chinese art techniques. Wong (left) with A.I. Gemini starting on a new piece, and UW Assistant Director of International Advancement Doug Wallack in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Doug Wallack[/caption] Adapted from an article by Doug Wallack, UW International Advancement In the quiet of vfxNova studios, overlooking Kowloon Bay, the robot dips its paint brush in the pigment, and with smooth, near-silent movements, it extends its single orange arm to apply vibrant cerulean, deep forest greens, and gentle shades of fern to the rice paper canvas below. The colors on the page gently melt into each other, as the machine dips and paints, dips and paints – and an abstract springtime landscape gradually appears below. The work in progress is equally beautiful and uncannily human. The robot, known as A.I. Gemini, is the brainchild of UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong (BSEE '89). Wong spent three years teaching the AI-powered robot to paint in the traditional Chinese xieyi style. As the first of its kind in the world, it made waves in the art, tech and pop culture worlds when it came on the scene in 2019, garnering coverage from Reuters, the South China Morning Post, the Daily Mail and more. Unlike generative AI artwork programs such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion that were subsequently released to the general public, Gemini is intrinsically material, and the works it creates reflect the dynamism of making art in the physical realm. Because Gemini debuted before the public NFT craze, producing physical paintings also had the benefit of rendering the robot’s works collectible. And indeed, the sale of its paintings, now in the hands of collectors worldwide, now exceeds $1 million cumulatively. [caption id="attachment_33436" align="alignleft" width="415"] Far Side Of The Moon 0001, A.I, 2019. Ink on paper, 89 x 62 cm. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] Gemini is just the latest development in Wong’s wide-ranging career as a visual artist. After graduating from the UW, Wong started up vfxNova, Hong Kong’s first computer graphics and visual effects house, which helped to develop the hardware and software necessary to advance CGI for the film industry. In the intervening decades, the award-winning firm has gone on to produce more than 800 TV advertisements and designed special effects for blockbuster video games such as the Final Fantasy series as well as for over 100 films, including “Iron Man,” “Fantastic Four,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D,” “Rise of the Legend,” “CJ7,” “Initial D,” among others. Today, vfxNova employs more than 150 artists and engineers with design houses in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Foshan. In May 2022, the College of Engineering recognized Wong as a Diamond Awardee for entrepreneurial excellence and significant contributions to the field of engineering. At the time, Hong Kong’s pandemic-era travel restrictions were still firmly in place, and Victor and his wife Thalia Tau were unable to attend the award ceremony in Seattle. Months later, in late February 2023, Husky alumni in Hong Kong were finally able to gather in-person at a dinner to celebrate Wong’s achievement. Wong was jovial: catching up with old friends, mugging for the camera with other guests – his crystal Diamond Award in hand, and regularly whipping out a tablet mid-conversation to show others proper-sized images of his firm’s recent installations and Gemini’s latest paintings. When asked about how his experience as a UW engineering student influenced his career, he grew reflective. “A UW education doesn’t supply you with all the answers,” he said, “But it gives you the right questions.” [caption id="attachment_33439" align="alignright" width="433"] Wong as a UW undergraduate, in front of Drumheller Fountain.[/caption] As Wong walked through the story of developing A.I. Gemini, it was clear that a spirit of inquiry suffused his process: a sense of playful curiosity about what constitutes innovation vs. invention in art, and a willingness to question how technology can be used to compliment the deeply human process of making art. At every turn, Wong seemed to ask how he could build a painting robot that would be both meaningfully grounded in tradition but that would also tilt towards novelty and creative discovery. At a foundational level, other generative AI platforms are trained by digesting huge libraries of existing images in order to mimic them in one remixed form or another, according to the prompts of the user. For Wong, while building such a program might have represented a technically interesting challenge, he found the level of artistic predictability it entailed to be creatively underwhelming. “It’s kind of duplicating human work,” he said – ultimately a dead end, when as an artist, “you want to create something you do not know.” So rather than training Gemini on the content of existing xieyi paintings, his training data set sought to impart technique. “I did not scan in paintings of the masters,” Wong said, “I treated it as a child.” Just as he himself had been taught the basics of calligraphy as a child, he trained Gemini on brush technique: a heavier brushstroke makes a wide line; more water in the ink yields a more diffuse effect on the paper. Drawing on his career in film, Wong also programmed in a sensibility about framing and angles – how to achieve balance and visual interest within the confines of a canvas. [caption id="attachment_33443" align="alignleft" width="430"] Wong, as a young man, standing beside a phoenix in his family’s shop. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] The same desire to nudge Gemini towards creating something unknown rather than executing perfect artistic mimicry informed Wong’s decision to develop it as a robot working with physical media rather than a digital program. The brushes, the ink, the slight imperfections in the texture of the outcome of a given work will never be entirely predictable. It’s not the only way that elements of chance are built into Gemini’s process, either: Wong explains that Gemini is linked to real-time weather data to facilitate a painterly mood – or “emotional emulation.” If Gemini is painting on a rainy day, the robot’s algorithm will instruct it to dilute the ink with more water than typical, creating a washed-out effect in the painting, much as a human artist like Wong himself is influenced by his immediate work environment. [caption id="attachment_33442" align="alignright" width="360"] Wong and A.I. Gemini. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] For an artist whose work had centered on the digital realm, Wong’s choice to emphasize materiality in an AI project seems curious. But at this point in his career, he said, “the digital world is so easy,” and the challenges of physical mediums beckoned. Partly, this represented a sort of artistic homecoming for Wong. When he was young, his father ran a shop making lanterns from bamboo and paper. The business was a family enterprise: his mother helped to color the lanterns and Wong himself aided in the assembly. These were elaborate handicrafts well beyond simply lighting features – paper renderings of mythical creatures, bicycles, cars and more. For Wong, teasing out the intricate forms from humble components was a formative experience. “I am obsessed with materials,” he said. His work with Gemini continues hand-in-hand with other more nascent experiments combining, for instance, AI and 3D-printed ceramics – all restlessly hybridizing tradition and technology. Asked what advice he would give to students, Wong did not hesitate: “Put yourself in a mode that is always curious,” he said, “You’ve got to love our world. If you love our world, you find all this amazing stuff.” [post_title] => UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong pushes boundaries in art and technology [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => victor-wong [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-02 10:32:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-02 18:32:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33375 [menu_order] => 7 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [_numposts:protected] => 6 [_rendered:protected] => 1 [_classes:protected] => Array ( [0] => view-block [1] => block--spotlight-robust-news ) [_finalHTML:protected] =>
https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/ultra-flat-optics/
Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging

Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging

Ultra-thin meta-optics have the potential to make imaging systems lighter and thinner than ever. Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for a wide range of applications.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/our-next-reality/
UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality

UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/the-integrator-2023-2024-prints/
Print issues of The Integrator are now available!

Print issues of The Integrator are now available!

Print issues of The Integrator, UW ECE’s flagship, annual publication, are now available! The magazine highlights the UW ECE community and covers stories about extraordinary students and their achievements, faculty research and discoveries, alumni news, events and more.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/uw-ece-assistant-professor-sara-mouradian-receives-afosr-yip-award-for-quantum-computing-research/
https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/a-laser-printer-for-photonic-chips/
A laser printer for photonic chips

A laser printer for photonic chips

A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li has invented a way to print and reconfigure photonic integrated circuits (microchips) using a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer.

https://www.ece.uw.edu/spotlight/victor-wong/
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Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for applications ranging from consumer electronics to thermal sensing and night vision. Shown above, a side view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics held above a conventional refractive lens. The meta-optics were developed by a multi-institutional research team led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption] Long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) imaging holds critical significance across many applications, from consumer electronics to defense and national security. It finds applications in night vision, remote sensing, and long-range imaging. However, the conventional refractive lenses employed in these imaging systems are bulky and heavy, which is undesirable for almost all applications. Compounding this issue is the fact that many LWIR refractive lenses are crafted from expensive and limited-supply materials, such as germanium. The next generation of optical systems demands lenses that are not only lighter and thinner than ever before, but also uphold uncompromising image quality. This demand has fueled a surge of efforts to develop ultra-thin sub-wavelength diffractive optics, known as meta-optics. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale nanopillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. While conventional refractive lenses are close to a centimeter thick, meta-optics are about 500 microns thick, which dramatically reduces the overall thickness of the optics. However, one challenge with meta-optics is strong chromatic aberrations. That is, light of different wavelengths interacts with the structure in different ways, and the result is typically a lens that cannot simultaneously focus light of different wavelengths in the same focal plane. Largely because of this issue, meta-optics have not yet fully replaced their refractive counterparts despite the benefits in size and weight reduction. In particular, the area of LWIR meta-optics is relatively unexplored compared to visible wavelength meta-optics, and the potential advantages of meta-optics over conventional refractive lenses are significant given the unique and extensive applications of this wavelength range. [caption id="attachment_33941" align="alignleft" width="300"]Arka Majumdar headshot UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Ryan Hoover.[/caption] Now, in a new paper published in Nature Communications, a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar, has introduced a new design framework termed “MTF-engineering.” The modulation transfer function, or MTF, describes how well a lens maintains image contrast as a function of spatial frequency. This framework addresses the challenges associated with broadband meta-optics to design and experimentally demonstrate thermal imaging with meta-optics in laboratory and real-world settings. The team built upon already successful inverse design techniques by developing a framework which optimizes both the pillar shape and the global arrangement simultaneously. UW ECE-affiliated team members included recent alumni Luocheng Huang (the paper’s lead author) and Zheyi Han, postdoctoral researchers Saswata Mukherjee, Johannes Fröch, and Quentin Tanguy as well as UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer, who is the director of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems at the UW.  

Leveraging artificial intelligence and a new inverse design framework

[caption id="attachment_33951" align="alignright" width="550"]A hand wearing a white glove holding a fabricated disk containing several small discs, which contain metaoptics. Below this photo are two grayscale photos of nanopillars. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale pillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. (Above) A full view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics. (Below) Scanning electron microscope images of the nanopillars contained within the team’s meta-optics. These meta-optics contain both complex light scatterers (left) and simple scatterers (right). Photos provided by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption] One key innovation in the research team’s approach is the use of artificial intelligence — a deep neural network (DNN) model — to map between pillar shape and phase. In an inverse design process for large area optics, it is not computationally feasible to simulate how the light interacts with each pillar at each iteration. To solve this problem, the authors simulated a large library of nanopillars (also called “meta-atoms”) and used the simulated data to train a DNN. The DNN enabled a quick mapping between scatterer and phase in the optimization loop, allowing the inverse design of large-area optics containing millions of micron-scale pillars. Another key innovation in this work is the figure of merit (FoM), leading to the framework being termed “MTF-engineering.” In inverse design, one defines an FoM and computationally optimizes the structure or arrangement to maximize the FoM. However, it is often not intuitive why the produced result is optimal. For this work, the authors leveraged their expertise in meta-optics to define an FoM that is intuitive. Majumdar explained, “The figure of merit is related to the area under the MTF curve. The idea here is to pass as much information as possible through the lens, which is captured in the MTF. Then, combined with a light computational backend, we can achieve a high-quality image.” He continued, “The figure of merit reflects what we intuitively know about optics. This particular FoM is optimized when all the wavelengths perform equally well, thus constraining our optics to have uniform performance over the specified wavelengths without explicitly defining uniformity as an optimization criterion.” This approach, combining intuition from meta-optics and a light computational backend, significantly improves performance compared to simple metalenses. The authors fabricated their designed optics from a single silicon wafer, which is promising for future applications involving germanium-free LWIR imaging systems. While acknowledging that there is still room for improvement to achieve imaging quality comparable to commercial refractive lens systems, this work represents a significant step toward that goal. The researchers have generously made their MTF-engineering framework, named “metabox,” available online via GitHub, inviting others to use it for designing their own meta-optics. The research team expressed excitement about the potential works that may emerge from the utilization of metabox in the broader scientific community. This article is an adaptation of a blog post available at Springer Nature Research Communities. For more information about the research described above read, “Broadband thermal imaging using meta-optics” in Nature Communications or contact UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. [post_title] => Ultra-flat optics for broadband thermal imaging [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ultra-flat-optics [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 09:14:23 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 16:14:23 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33933 [menu_order] => 1 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33767 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-02-29 09:22:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-29 17:22:53 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33785" align="alignright" width="575"]Alvin Graylin in a business suit, sitting at a table UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways. He also is scheduled to be the honored guest speaker at this year’s UW ECE Graduation ceremony.[/caption] UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin (BSEE ‘93) is looking ahead. And what he sees coming in technology development over the next decade has given him reasons for both hope and concern, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and extended reality, or XR, which encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality environments. “We’re in a tenuous time in this society, where AI and XR is growing so quickly that it will be very difficult for society to cope, from cultural, economic and geopolitical perspectives,” Graylin said. “The decisions that we make as a species in the next five to 10 years about how we handle this technology will impact the next thousand years in terms of how humanity will progress.” That last statement may sound hard to believe, but Graylin is an influential technology pioneer, executive, entrepreneur, and thought leader who got his start in the semiconductor industry and has well over 30 years’ experience creating, developing, and delivering products based on AI and XR. His career is international in scope, spanning the U.S., China, and Taiwan, and it includes leadership roles at companies in all three countries. Currently, Graylin is the Global VP of Development for HTC, a Taiwanese consumer electronics company that is a world leader in the development of virtual reality and augmented reality platforms. Part of his job at HTC entails serving as co-head of the ViveX VR Accelerator, which is the company’s global program for investing in startups at the intersection of virtual reality, augmented reality, AI and 5G technologies. He is also vice-chairman of the Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance in China and president of the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance, which brings XR investment opportunities to its member corporations and venture capitalists.
“We’re in a tenuous time in this society, where AI and XR is growing so quickly that it will be very difficult for society to cope, from cultural, economic and geopolitical perspectives.” — UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin
Graylin’s entrepreneurial and leadership experience is extensive. He has founded four venture-backed startups in areas ranging from AI-based natural language search to big-data AI analytics across China and the U.S. As an investor, he has been involved in funding over 100 startups. He is a much sought-after speaker, who is frequently featured at leading international conferences and in the media on topics relating to AI, XR, entrepreneurship, and for his insights on the Chinese market. He also is scheduled to be the honored guest speaker at this year’s UW ECE Graduation ceremony. Now, Graylin is co-author of a new, visionary book that seeks to answer some of the most pressing questions about how the confluence of AI and XR technologies stands to reshape our world in profound ways.

Our Next Reality

[caption id="attachment_33789" align="alignright" width="350"]Our Next Reality book cover Graylin’s book, “Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse will Reshape the World,” will be released through Amazon Kindle on March 5, Audible on March 6, and it will be available in print June 4 this year.[/caption] “Our Next Reality: How the AI-powered Metaverse will Reshape the World” explores 13 questions about AI and the metaverse (today’s internet built out as an XR environment), which Graylin debates with his co-author Louis Rosenberg, who was an early pioneer of virtual and augmented reality development and is a longtime AI researcher. It also includes a foreword by renowned author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” and section contributions from respected industry thought leaders. The book already has received several favorable reviews from those in the vanguard of science and technology, such as Ray Kurzweil, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Dava Newman. Graylin said that he and Rosenberg wrote the book with three audiences in mind: government leaders and policy makers, those working in the AI and XR industries, and the next generation of scientists and engineers. “I’ve created and brought to market a number of technology products that have impacted hundreds of millions of people,” Graylin said. “Writing this book is a way of sharing some of my experience and knowledge, and hopefully, it might inspire a young person to do the right thing when it comes to AI and XR.” Graylin said that he and Rosenberg designed the book to help better inform those in government who are involved with incentivizing and regulating the AI and XR industries but who might not have a scientific or technical background. For those working in AI and XR, Graylin hopes the book convinces them to put in safeguards when designing products to protect end-users and the public. The book also emphasizes the importance of ethical technology development. Graylin said that in addition to motivating the next generation of scientists and engineers to consider the importance of ethics when it comes to AI and XR, he would like to inspire them to realize that they will be entering a world through the AI-powered metaverse that will be more amazing than anything people living today, or prior generations, have ever seen.
“I am optimistic, and I feel like we have the potential to get to a good long-term outcome when it comes to AI and XR development, but only if we have the determination to do the right thing and consciously work at it all along the way.” — UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin
In line with his forward-looking viewpoint, Graylin also chose to write the book for a fourth audience that hasn’t yet come into existence — an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a sentient AI system that possesses intelligence equal to or greater than that of a human. “There is a small section of the book that is written for an AGI learning agent, so that if it scans this information, it can see what we are trying to do,” Graylin said. “This information, hopefully, will help the AGI see its position as our ‘descendant’ and motivate it to treat human beings as its ancestors, in a positive way.” Graylin and his co-author see the confluence of AI and the metaverse as a game-changer, capable of revolutionizing the education system, government, and almost every industry in existence. Both are concerned about the speed of AI development today. “If AI continues to progress at the rate we’re currently seeing, it will be able to replace most of the labor out there in about a decade, whether it’s cognitive or manual labor. It means that our relationship with our jobs and occupations will be drastically changed,” Graylin said. “In the past, when we’ve had other industrial revolutions, they’ve happened over decades. That was enough time to allow society to adapt and adjust. But this revolution will happen so quickly that it will be very difficult for societies to adjust and create new outlets for their people’s energy.” In the book, Graylin talks about the potential of the AI-powered metaverse to create purpose and opportunities for people around the world, especially for those who have less access to real-world opportunities. However, both he and Rosenberg are concerned that the current, hyper-competitive model between companies and nations for AI development is counterproductive, and in the long-term, dangerous. “Essentially, if one company or one country wins this race, we all lose, as a society and a world community,” Graylin said. “The key is that we cannot let this race start, because if it starts, somebody will win, and whoever the winner is will be too tempted to use the dominant AI technology they have developed in selfish ways.” As an antidote to this possible outcome, and to prepare for the coming convergence of AI and the metaverse, Graylin recommends more international cooperation in the design, development, and implementation of AI and XR as well as cooperative effort creating ethical and safety guidelines for these powerful technologies. He said that working to incorporate diverse representation of people and ideas into AI systems is also very important, as this will help expand system knowledge and perspective, reducing biases and potential for harm. “I’m actually not afraid of a super intelligent AGI system being developed because, by definition, that system will have enough knowledge and experience built-in to make wise, compassionate decisions,” Graylin said. “I’m afraid of the young and impetuous AI system that has been fed a limited, biased dataset but still has the power to have a real impact on human lives.” Graylin said that people need to be thoughtful about what data they are feeding to AI systems, and that scientists and engineers need to be careful about what tools they give AI systems access to — in a manner somewhat akin to raising children responsibly. “To be honest, I think we are creating our children, the next evolution of intelligence,” Graylin said. “I am optimistic, and I feel like we have the potential to get to a good long-term outcome when it comes to AI and XR development, but only if we have the determination to do the right thing and consciously work at it all along the way.”

Positive role models, UW connections

[caption id="attachment_33794" align="alignright" width="350"]UW Professor Emeritus Tom Furness is holding a virtual reality headset and standing next to Alvin Graylin in front of the HIT Lab Graylin with UW Professor Emeritus Tom Furness, who is holding a Vive Focus virtual reality headset. Furness is a pioneer in human interface technology and is well-known in the tech sector as the “Grandfather of Virtual Reality.”[/caption] To that end, Graylin is on the Science and Ethics Council at the Virtual World Society, which provides guidance for the responsible development and adoption of emerging technologies, working to ensure that they will benefit society as a whole. This organization was founded by Tom Furness, who is a Professor Emeritus in the industrial and systems engineering department at the UW and was a UW ECE adjunct professor during his tenure at the University. Furness is a pioneer in human interface technology and is well-known in the tech sector as the “Grandfather of Virtual Reality.” Graylin built his foundation in virtual reality research when he was an undergraduate student working with Furness in the Human Interface Technology Lab. He considers Furness to be a formative role model and today, a friend and colleague. “I’ve joined Tom’s organization to help him spread the message of how to utilize immersive technologies for creating a better society,” Graylin said. “I think that ties back into the questions and issues Louis and I have written about in our book.” Graylin noted that he has benefited over the years from positive, accomplished role models like Furness, both at the UW and within his own family. His father was a well-known artist in China and the U.S., and before he was born, his mother co-founded two leading ballet schools in the country — the Guangzhou and Shanghai School of Dance. The latter was for the premier ballet company in Beijing, China at the time. In the early 1980s, his parents fled oppression stemming from the Cultural Revolution in China and immigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. The family chose to settle in the Seattle area, and he and his brother, Will Graylin, followed parallel paths. Both showed an interest and aptitude for technology, both graduated from the UW, and later, MIT, and then went on to successful careers in the tech sector, becoming leaders in their respective fields. Most recently, the brothers spoke on a panel together at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, commonly known as CES. According to Graylin, his father instilled within him and his brother a deep sense of purpose. “My dad’s theory was that everyone is here on earth to contribute in some way, to make society and the world better, and that we should find a way to maximize whatever that impact is,” Graylin said. “He told me that I needed to find whatever it was that I was good at, so I could make the biggest contribution I could, so that the world would be a better place after I am gone. That has been my driving purpose since I was a child.” As one might imagine, with an inner purpose like that, Graylin was and is a hard worker. He said he has always held at least a part-time job since he was 10 years old. As an undergraduate at the UW, he built and sold computers to help finance his education. He also chose to study electrical engineering over aeronautics and aerospace engineering because he believed EE was more practical and served a broader market. That way, he thought he would have more potential to do what his father asked him to do, which was to maximize his impact in the world. At UW ECE, Graylin focused on studying virtual reality as applied to education markets and parallel processing computer architecture design applied to neural network AI applications. He said that he especially enjoyed his computer architecture course, and it was part of what brought him to his first full-time job at Intel after he graduated. Over the course of his career, Graylin has returned to UW ECE several times to give talks to students. He also has been an active alumnus, regularly participating in alumni events, and when his career was based in China, he was a member of the UW alumni club in both Shanghai and Beijing. “UW ECE provided a demanding, but well-balanced and well-structured education. I never felt like I didn’t have a resource that another school might have, and I didn’t feel limited in any way,” Graylin said. “It’s also nice to see the progress the UW has made over the last three decades. It’s definitely becoming a lot more recognized as a global powerhouse of education. It makes me proud to say I’m a UW ECE graduate.”

Moving into the next reality

[caption id="attachment_33798" align="alignright" width="550"]Three men sit in chairs on a stage in front of a screen at the 2024 CES. The man in the center, Alvin Graylin, holds a virtual reality headset. Alvin Graylin (center) shares the stage with his brother Will Graylin (right). The brothers spoke on a panel at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, commonly known as CES. Alvin Graylin is holding a Vive XR Elite headset. XR stands for “extended reality,” which encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality immersive technologies.[/caption] Now, after 18 years working in China, Graylin has moved back to Seattle. In addition to his day job at HTC, he is busy promoting the release of his new book, and he plans to spend more time with his two daughters — one who graduated from the UW last year and one who will graduate from the UW this year. Both of his daughters plan to stay in the Pacific Northwest. When asked what he would recommend for students interested in pursuing a career that blends AI with XR, Graylin said that there is no substitute for hands-on experience. “I think the key is that you have to go and do it,” Graylin said. “Go play with the tools, go play with the devices, go make something, versus just attending lectures and doing class projects.” He also advises students to make it a point to read as much as they can, both within and beyond the scope of their major, which he said can help students make connections between their focus area and the world around them. Graylin emphasized the value of entrepreneurial experience for those beginning their career, which he believes can provide knowledge outside the scope of a corporate job and can make any recent graduate a more well-rounded person. Overall, although he acknowledges the many challenges on the road ahead, Graylin remains optimistic and excited about the future for AI and XR and the opportunities these immersive technologies could provide for the next generation of scientists and engineers as well as the world at-large. “I believe that an AI-powered metaverse could allow us to get to a place where our basic needs will be satisfied as individuals and as a society, and it could enable us, over the next few hundred years, to solve mysteries of the universe that have perplexed us since the beginning of time,” Graylin said. “I think that could be a pretty amazing change in terms of purpose for people today. We can use the AI-powered metaverse to help people to think higher and encourage them to work toward fulfilling their destinies as intelligent beings.” Visit the Our Next Reality website for more information about Alvin Graylin’s new book. The website includes a link to “Our Next Reality AI,”  an OpenAI ChatGPT large language model that was customized by Graylin to be an expert at answering questions about the convergence of AI and immersive technologies.  [post_title] => UW ECE alumnus Alvin Graylin envisions our next reality [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => our-next-reality [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-29 09:22:53 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-29 17:22:53 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33767 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33751 [post_author] => 36 [post_date] => 2024-02-14 15:42:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-14 23:42:31 [post_content] => Read the latest issue of The Integrator, UW ECE's annual magazine, which covers faculty, student and alumni news, research and more! The magazine is online and print copies are now available at the ECE front office.  The Integrator 2023- 2024 magazine [post_title] => Print issues of The Integrator are now available! [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-integrator-2023-2024-prints [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-15 10:39:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-15 18:39:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33751 [menu_order] => 3 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33637 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-02-21 08:40:13 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-21 16:40:13 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33638" align="alignright" width="600"]UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian headshot UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian (above) has been awarded a three-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, through its Young Investigator Program, or YIP. The grant will support work in Mouradian’s Scalable Quantum Research Lab, which aims to build, understand and control trapped ion quantum systems in order to develop useful and practical quantum technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption] UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian has been awarded a three-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, through its Young Investigator Program, or YIP. The grant will support work in Mouradian’s Scalable Quantum Research Lab, which aims to build, understand and control trapped ion quantum systems in order to develop useful and practical quantum technologies. Mouradian joins an elite group of investigators as one of only 48 scientists and engineers from across the nation that have been awarded a 2024 AFOSR YIP grant. These individuals have each demonstrated exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research relevant to the U.S. Air Force and national defense. “It’s an honor to receive this award and be part of such a prestigious group of talented investigators,” said Mouradian, who also is a member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and QuantumX at the UW. “It’s very exciting for both me and my students to know that our work is valued by the AFOSR and by the community.” Quantum computing and related technologies promise significant breakthroughs in sensing, communication, and computation along with exponential increases in speed for solving complex problems, with potential impact in areas such as pharmaceutical development, materials science, and cryptography. Quantum technologies also could fundamentally change the defense sector, providing new modes for secure communication and computational advantage. However, scientists and engineers still face many challenges before they can build a fault-tolerant computational architecture, which is required for quantum systems to be capable of solving real-world problems. Mouradian’s work is anticipated to strengthen AFOSR Quantum Information Sciences programs by building a foundation for future research into fault-tolerant quantum computation based on trapped ions.
The AFOSR YIP grant will enable us to investigate using optical forces and long ion chains for quantum computing, and I believe that there will be many more future applications for the technology we are developing. — UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian
Trapped ion quantum systems are considered by many, including Mouradian, to be one of the best options available for scaling up quantum computers to the level needed for practical applications. The AFOSR YIP grant will enable Mouradian and her research team to investigate ways of using optical forces generated by laser beams to control and stabilize long chains of trapped ions for quantum information processing. Mouradian’s team will conduct theoretical work with trapped ions and then validate their findings with experiments. A considerable portion of the team’s experimental effort will be spent on building a powerful optical system, which will enable flexible and stable quantum state control for long ion chains. The device uses “optical tweezers,” which employ optical forces to help partition ion chains on the fly to improve gate (circuit) fidelity, stabilize ion chains against high-energy collisions with background gas molecules, and improve the efficiency of cooling long ion chains in the presence of electric field noise. “We will be setting up a new component to our system — the optical laser beams that will provide the optical forces,” Mouradian said. “This is a new capability that only a handful of ion trap labs around the world have.” Work supported by the grant gets underway this spring. The research team includes students and scholars in Mouradian’s lab, including Ritika (Rithi) Anandwade, a graduate student in the physics department, who will fully dedicate her time to the project during the duration of the grant. Brant Bowers, a postdoctoral scholar in Mouradian’s lab, will be allocating about a quarter of his time to this work. The team also includes UW ECE doctoral students Hae Lim and Sean Garner, as well as a research assistant, Vikram Kaskyap, and UW ECE undergraduates Minh Anh Nguyen and Charlotte Epstein-O’Rourke and Lukshya Ganjoo, a UW undergraduate student in the mathematics department and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Mouradian anticipates training other UW graduate and undergraduate students as well on the new modeling and experimental techniques the group will be implementing. Looking ahead, Mouradian says that research supported by the AFOSR YIP grant will enable the field of quantum information science and technology to fully capitalize on the power of long chains of ions. She also believes that this work will help lay the foundation for more studies on optimal architectures for trapped-ion quantum information processing. According to Mouradian, future research in this area could explore optical forces that are modulated during the application of quantum gates (basic quantum circuits) to add to and enhance the current set of tools for quantum control. “The AFOSR YIP grant will enable us to investigate using optical forces and long ion chains for quantum computing, and I believe that there will be many more future applications for the technology we are developing,” Mouradian said. “I am very grateful to the AFOSR for their support, and I am looking forward to what we will be able to accomplish together.” Learn more about UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian and her research at the Scalable Quantum Research Lab website and in the article “Sara Mouradian — building quantum technologies for computing, communication and sensing.” [post_title] => UW ECE Assistant Professor Sara Mouradian receives AFOSR YIP award for quantum computing research [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => uw-ece-assistant-professor-sara-mouradian-receives-afosr-yip-award-for-quantum-computing-research [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-26 08:48:54 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-26 16:48:54 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33637 [menu_order] => 5 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33559 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-01-25 08:47:10 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-01-25 16:47:10 [post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_33561" align="alignright" width="525"]An illustration of a laser beam engraving a microchip in a black box frame, plus an inset showing the photonic chip circuitry A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li has invented a new way to print and reconfigure photonic integrated circuits (microchips) using a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer. This device could enable students and researchers to bypass expensive nanofabrication facilities and produce photonic integrated circuits almost anywhere. The technology also has possible industrial applications. Illustration by Haoquin Deng | UW ECE[/caption] Photonic integrated circuits are an important, next-wave technology. These sophisticated microchips hold the potential to substantially decrease costs and increase speed and efficiency for electronic devices across a wide range of application areas, including automotive technology, communications, healthcare, data storage, and computing for artificial intelligence. Photonic circuits use photons, fundamental particles of light, to move, store, and access information in much the same way that conventional electronic circuits use electrons for this purpose. Photonic chips are already in use today in advanced fiber-optic communication systems, and they are being developed for implementation in a broad spectrum of near-future technologies, including light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, for autonomous vehicles; light-based sensors for medical devices; 5G and 6G communication networks; and optical and quantum computing. Given the broad range of existing and future uses for photonic integrated circuits, access to equipment that can fabricate chip designs for study, research and industrial applications is also important. However, today’s nanofabrication facilities cost millions of dollars to construct and are well beyond the reach of many colleges, universities, and research labs. For those who can access a nanofabrication facility, at least a day must be reserved for the exacting and time-consuming lithographic process used to make these microchips. On top of that, if an error is made in design, or if the chip doesn’t work properly for some other reason, the faulty circuit must be discarded, the design adjusted, and a new chip fabricated. This often results in days or even weeks spent in the cleanroom. But now, as described in a new paper in Science Advances, a UW ECE-led research team has devised a way to bypass expensive nanofabrication facilities and produce photonic integrated circuits almost anywhere. The team has developed an innovative method in which these circuits can be written, erased, and modified by a laser writer into a thin film of phase-change material similar to what is used for recordable CDs and DVDs. This new process allows photonic integrated circuits to be constructed and reconfigured in a fraction of the time it would take at a nanofabrication lab.
"Using our method, photonic circuits that previously had to be fabricated in expensive and hard-to-access facilities now can be printed and reconfigured in labs, classrooms, and even garage workshops..." — UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li
The multi-university team was led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li, who is the Department’s associate chair for research, a member of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and the senior author of the paper. “Photonics technology is on the horizon; therefore, we need to train or educate our students in this field. But for students to study and have hands-on experience with photonic circuits, currently, they need access to a multimillion-dollar facility,” Li said. “This new technology addresses that problem. Using our method, photonic circuits that previously had to be fabricated in expensive and hard-to-access facilities now can be printed and reconfigured in labs, classrooms, and even garage workshops, by a speedy, low-cost device about the size of a conventional desktop laser printer.”

Benefits for students, researchers and industry

[caption id="attachment_33566" align="alignright" width="525"]Researcher headshots From left to right: UW ECE and Physics Professor Mo Li, UW ECE graduate student Changming Fu, UW ECE graduate student Haoqin Deng. Photo of Mo Li by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption] Students aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from this new way of creating photonic integrated circuits. For researchers, this advance will enable a much quicker turnaround time for prototyping and testing out a new idea before booking valuable time in a nanofabrication facility. And for industrial applications, a big advantage of this method for producing photonic integrated circuits is reconfigurability. For example, companies could possibly use this technology to create reconfigurable optical connections in data centers, especially in systems that support artificial intelligence and machine learning, which would lead to cost savings and production efficiencies. Li’s research team included UW ECE graduate student Changming Wu, who is lead author of the paper, and, along with Li, came up with the idea for this novel way of building photonic integrated circuits. UW ECE graduate student Haoqin Deng also contributed to the effort. Their work is the latest result of a six-year line of research at the UW that includes advances in optical computing. It is also a continuation of a productive collaboration with Professors Ichiro Takeuchi and Carlos A. Ríos Ocampo and their students at the University of Maryland. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation. “Being able to write a whole photonic circuit using only one single step, without a complicated fabrication process, is really exciting. And the fact that we can make any modification to any part of the circuit in our own lab and rewrite and redo it is amazing,” Wu said. “It’s a matter of minutes versus a full, day-long process. It’s a huge relief to be able to finish the whole fabrication process within a few minutes instead of what often is several days or even a week.”

Improving performance, building a commercial device

The method the team developed has been proven to work, but it is still an early-stage concept. However, Li has filed a provisional patent application, and he has plans in progress to build a desktop laser writer for photonic integrated circuits. This printer could be sold at an affordable price and distributed widely to research labs and educational institutions around the world. He is also engaging with industry leaders to promote possible applications of this new technology in programmable photonic chips and reconfigurable optical networks. This laser printer for photonic chips will use a staging system that will move the substrate in a much more precise manner than in a traditional desktop printer. The team will be seeking ways to optimize its performance as they build a prototype. They also will be working on reducing optical loss in the phase-change material they are using through further research in material science and laser writing techniques. This will enable the printer to produce even more detailed and sophisticated circuits than what is currently possible. Li said that he and his research team were very excited about what lay ahead. “This technology can create the photonic circuitry you want, but it also can be added onto already-existing electronic circuitry. And because it is reconfigurable and reusable, it just opens many possibilities for students, researchers, and industry,” Li said. “What’s most exciting to me is that we’ll potentially have a huge impact on the field of photonics in disseminating this new tool and technology to the broader research community.” For more information about the research described in this article, read “Freeform direct-write and rewritable photonic integrated circuits in phase-change thin films” in Science Advances, or contact Professor Mo Li. [post_title] => A laser printer for photonic chips [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => a-laser-printer-for-photonic-chips [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-01-26 12:18:58 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-01-26 20:18:58 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33559 [menu_order] => 6 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33375 [post_author] => 36 [post_date] => 2024-02-02 10:32:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-02-02 18:32:41 [post_content] => [caption id="attachment_33432" align="alignright" width="584"] UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong (BSEE '89) has had a fulfilling career combining his engineering background with visual arts, most notably with A.I. Gemini, an AI-powered robot that creates paintings using traditional Chinese art techniques. Wong (left) with A.I. Gemini starting on a new piece, and UW Assistant Director of International Advancement Doug Wallack in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Doug Wallack[/caption] Adapted from an article by Doug Wallack, UW International Advancement In the quiet of vfxNova studios, overlooking Kowloon Bay, the robot dips its paint brush in the pigment, and with smooth, near-silent movements, it extends its single orange arm to apply vibrant cerulean, deep forest greens, and gentle shades of fern to the rice paper canvas below. The colors on the page gently melt into each other, as the machine dips and paints, dips and paints – and an abstract springtime landscape gradually appears below. The work in progress is equally beautiful and uncannily human. The robot, known as A.I. Gemini, is the brainchild of UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong (BSEE '89). Wong spent three years teaching the AI-powered robot to paint in the traditional Chinese xieyi style. As the first of its kind in the world, it made waves in the art, tech and pop culture worlds when it came on the scene in 2019, garnering coverage from Reuters, the South China Morning Post, the Daily Mail and more. Unlike generative AI artwork programs such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion that were subsequently released to the general public, Gemini is intrinsically material, and the works it creates reflect the dynamism of making art in the physical realm. Because Gemini debuted before the public NFT craze, producing physical paintings also had the benefit of rendering the robot’s works collectible. And indeed, the sale of its paintings, now in the hands of collectors worldwide, now exceeds $1 million cumulatively. [caption id="attachment_33436" align="alignleft" width="415"] Far Side Of The Moon 0001, A.I, 2019. Ink on paper, 89 x 62 cm. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] Gemini is just the latest development in Wong’s wide-ranging career as a visual artist. After graduating from the UW, Wong started up vfxNova, Hong Kong’s first computer graphics and visual effects house, which helped to develop the hardware and software necessary to advance CGI for the film industry. In the intervening decades, the award-winning firm has gone on to produce more than 800 TV advertisements and designed special effects for blockbuster video games such as the Final Fantasy series as well as for over 100 films, including “Iron Man,” “Fantastic Four,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D,” “Rise of the Legend,” “CJ7,” “Initial D,” among others. Today, vfxNova employs more than 150 artists and engineers with design houses in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Foshan. In May 2022, the College of Engineering recognized Wong as a Diamond Awardee for entrepreneurial excellence and significant contributions to the field of engineering. At the time, Hong Kong’s pandemic-era travel restrictions were still firmly in place, and Victor and his wife Thalia Tau were unable to attend the award ceremony in Seattle. Months later, in late February 2023, Husky alumni in Hong Kong were finally able to gather in-person at a dinner to celebrate Wong’s achievement. Wong was jovial: catching up with old friends, mugging for the camera with other guests – his crystal Diamond Award in hand, and regularly whipping out a tablet mid-conversation to show others proper-sized images of his firm’s recent installations and Gemini’s latest paintings. When asked about how his experience as a UW engineering student influenced his career, he grew reflective. “A UW education doesn’t supply you with all the answers,” he said, “But it gives you the right questions.” [caption id="attachment_33439" align="alignright" width="433"] Wong as a UW undergraduate, in front of Drumheller Fountain.[/caption] As Wong walked through the story of developing A.I. Gemini, it was clear that a spirit of inquiry suffused his process: a sense of playful curiosity about what constitutes innovation vs. invention in art, and a willingness to question how technology can be used to compliment the deeply human process of making art. At every turn, Wong seemed to ask how he could build a painting robot that would be both meaningfully grounded in tradition but that would also tilt towards novelty and creative discovery. At a foundational level, other generative AI platforms are trained by digesting huge libraries of existing images in order to mimic them in one remixed form or another, according to the prompts of the user. For Wong, while building such a program might have represented a technically interesting challenge, he found the level of artistic predictability it entailed to be creatively underwhelming. “It’s kind of duplicating human work,” he said – ultimately a dead end, when as an artist, “you want to create something you do not know.” So rather than training Gemini on the content of existing xieyi paintings, his training data set sought to impart technique. “I did not scan in paintings of the masters,” Wong said, “I treated it as a child.” Just as he himself had been taught the basics of calligraphy as a child, he trained Gemini on brush technique: a heavier brushstroke makes a wide line; more water in the ink yields a more diffuse effect on the paper. Drawing on his career in film, Wong also programmed in a sensibility about framing and angles – how to achieve balance and visual interest within the confines of a canvas. [caption id="attachment_33443" align="alignleft" width="430"] Wong, as a young man, standing beside a phoenix in his family’s shop. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] The same desire to nudge Gemini towards creating something unknown rather than executing perfect artistic mimicry informed Wong’s decision to develop it as a robot working with physical media rather than a digital program. The brushes, the ink, the slight imperfections in the texture of the outcome of a given work will never be entirely predictable. It’s not the only way that elements of chance are built into Gemini’s process, either: Wong explains that Gemini is linked to real-time weather data to facilitate a painterly mood – or “emotional emulation.” If Gemini is painting on a rainy day, the robot’s algorithm will instruct it to dilute the ink with more water than typical, creating a washed-out effect in the painting, much as a human artist like Wong himself is influenced by his immediate work environment. [caption id="attachment_33442" align="alignright" width="360"] Wong and A.I. Gemini. Photo courtesy of Victor Wong[/caption] For an artist whose work had centered on the digital realm, Wong’s choice to emphasize materiality in an AI project seems curious. But at this point in his career, he said, “the digital world is so easy,” and the challenges of physical mediums beckoned. Partly, this represented a sort of artistic homecoming for Wong. When he was young, his father ran a shop making lanterns from bamboo and paper. The business was a family enterprise: his mother helped to color the lanterns and Wong himself aided in the assembly. These were elaborate handicrafts well beyond simply lighting features – paper renderings of mythical creatures, bicycles, cars and more. For Wong, teasing out the intricate forms from humble components was a formative experience. “I am obsessed with materials,” he said. His work with Gemini continues hand-in-hand with other more nascent experiments combining, for instance, AI and 3D-printed ceramics – all restlessly hybridizing tradition and technology. Asked what advice he would give to students, Wong did not hesitate: “Put yourself in a mode that is always curious,” he said, “You’ve got to love our world. If you love our world, you find all this amazing stuff.” [post_title] => UW ECE alumnus Victor Wong pushes boundaries in art and technology [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => victor-wong [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-02-02 10:32:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-02-02 18:32:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=33375 [menu_order] => 7 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 6 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 33933 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2024-03-14 09:11:19 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-03-14 16:11:19 [post_content] => By Anna Wirth-Singh | UW Department of Physics [caption id="attachment_33938" align="alignright" width="550"]Hand wearing a purple glove holding a conventional refractive lens and a wafer disc containing ultra-thin metaoptics Ultra-thin meta-optics have the potential to make imaging systems lighter and thinner than ever. Using a new inverse design framework, a UW ECE-led research team has demonstrated broadband thermal imaging with meta-optics for applications ranging from consumer electronics to thermal sensing and night vision. Shown above, a side view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics held above a conventional refractive lens. The meta-optics were developed by a multi-institutional research team led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption] Long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) imaging holds critical significance across many applications, from consumer electronics to defense and national security. It finds applications in night vision, remote sensing, and long-range imaging. However, the conventional refractive lenses employed in these imaging systems are bulky and heavy, which is undesirable for almost all applications. Compounding this issue is the fact that many LWIR refractive lenses are crafted from expensive and limited-supply materials, such as germanium. The next generation of optical systems demands lenses that are not only lighter and thinner than ever before, but also uphold uncompromising image quality. This demand has fueled a surge of efforts to develop ultra-thin sub-wavelength diffractive optics, known as meta-optics. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale nanopillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. While conventional refractive lenses are close to a centimeter thick, meta-optics are about 500 microns thick, which dramatically reduces the overall thickness of the optics. However, one challenge with meta-optics is strong chromatic aberrations. That is, light of different wavelengths interacts with the structure in different ways, and the result is typically a lens that cannot simultaneously focus light of different wavelengths in the same focal plane. Largely because of this issue, meta-optics have not yet fully replaced their refractive counterparts despite the benefits in size and weight reduction. In particular, the area of LWIR meta-optics is relatively unexplored compared to visible wavelength meta-optics, and the potential advantages of meta-optics over conventional refractive lenses are significant given the unique and extensive applications of this wavelength range. [caption id="attachment_33941" align="alignleft" width="300"]Arka Majumdar headshot UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. Photo by Ryan Hoover.[/caption] Now, in a new paper published in Nature Communications, a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar, has introduced a new design framework termed “MTF-engineering.” The modulation transfer function, or MTF, describes how well a lens maintains image contrast as a function of spatial frequency. This framework addresses the challenges associated with broadband meta-optics to design and experimentally demonstrate thermal imaging with meta-optics in laboratory and real-world settings. The team built upon already successful inverse design techniques by developing a framework which optimizes both the pillar shape and the global arrangement simultaneously. UW ECE-affiliated team members included recent alumni Luocheng Huang (the paper’s lead author) and Zheyi Han, postdoctoral researchers Saswata Mukherjee, Johannes Fröch, and Quentin Tanguy as well as UW ECE Professor Karl Böhringer, who is the director of the Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems at the UW.  

Leveraging artificial intelligence and a new inverse design framework

[caption id="attachment_33951" align="alignright" width="550"]A hand wearing a white glove holding a fabricated disk containing several small discs, which contain metaoptics. Below this photo are two grayscale photos of nanopillars. Meta-optics, in their simplest form, consist of arrays of sub-wavelength scale pillars on a flat surface, with each pillar introducing a local phase shift to light passing through. By strategically arranging these pillars, the light can be controlled to produce steering and lensing. (Above) A full view of a fabricated wafer containing meta-optics. (Below) Scanning electron microscope images of the nanopillars contained within the team’s meta-optics. These meta-optics contain both complex light scatterers (left) and simple scatterers (right). Photos provided by Anna Wirth-Singh.[/caption] One key innovation in the research team’s approach is the use of artificial intelligence — a deep neural network (DNN) model — to map between pillar shape and phase. In an inverse design process for large area optics, it is not computationally feasible to simulate how the light interacts with each pillar at each iteration. To solve this problem, the authors simulated a large library of nanopillars (also called “meta-atoms”) and used the simulated data to train a DNN. The DNN enabled a quick mapping between scatterer and phase in the optimization loop, allowing the inverse design of large-area optics containing millions of micron-scale pillars. Another key innovation in this work is the figure of merit (FoM), leading to the framework being termed “MTF-engineering.” In inverse design, one defines an FoM and computationally optimizes the structure or arrangement to maximize the FoM. However, it is often not intuitive why the produced result is optimal. For this work, the authors leveraged their expertise in meta-optics to define an FoM that is intuitive. Majumdar explained, “The figure of merit is related to the area under the MTF curve. The idea here is to pass as much information as possible through the lens, which is captured in the MTF. Then, combined with a light computational backend, we can achieve a high-quality image.” He continued, “The figure of merit reflects what we intuitively know about optics. This particular FoM is optimized when all the wavelengths perform equally well, thus constraining our optics to have uniform performance over the specified wavelengths without explicitly defining uniformity as an optimization criterion.” This approach, combining intuition from meta-optics and a light computational backend, significantly improves performance compared to simple metalenses. The authors fabricated their designed optics from a single silicon wafer, which is promising for future applications involving germanium-free LWIR imaging systems. While acknowledging that there is still room for improvement to achieve imaging quality comparable to commercial refractive lens systems, this work represents a significant step toward that goal. The researchers have generously made their MTF-engineering framework, named “metabox,” available online via GitHub, inviting others to use it for designing their own meta-optics. The research team expressed excitement about the potential works that may emerge from the utilization of metabox in the broader scientific community. This article is an adaptation of a blog post available at Springer Nature Research Communities. For more information about the research described above read, “Broadband thermal imaging using meta-optics” in Nature Communications or contact UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar. 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