Analog Mixed-Signal and Photonic Integrated Circuits expert presenting at ISSCC and OFC

Newswise — Vishal Saxena, associate professor in the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering, will be presenting work by his Analog Mixed-Signal and Photonic Integrated Circuits (AMPIC) lab at the prestigious IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which takes place in San Francisco from Feb 19-23, 2023. At the “Ideas for The Future” session (held on Tuesday, Feb 21 from 10:15 AM-12:00 PM PST) Saxena and Ph.D. candidate Md Jubayer Shawon will present “A Silicon Photonic Reconfigurable Optical AnalogProcessor (SiROAP) with a 4×4 Optical Mesh” (Presentation ID: 13.6).

This talk will include experimental results for a reconfigurable processor, also known as an optical field-programmable gate array (FPGA), that contains hundreds of optical components integrated into a single chip. This type of technology has the potential to support a wide array of applications, including flexible wireless systems, transport of wideband wireless signals on lightweight optical fibers, data center infrastructure, biochemical sensors, and optical quantum computer building blocks.ISSCC is also known as the Olympics of chip design and features breakthrough results from fabricated chips from academic and industry research labs.

This showcases an interest in large-scale photonics in mainstream electronics, which can potentially chart the course for growth in the semiconductor industry beyond Moore’s Law. The goal of the AMPIC lab, directed by Saxena and housed in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is to use complex electronic chips to envision entirely new architectures that alleviate long-standing challenges in electronics and open new avenues through the integration of optics. The lab’s research is supported by Young Faculty awards from the National Science Foundation, the AirForce, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

---

Saxena will also be presenting this work at the premier Optical Fiber Conference (OFC), which takes place in San Diego from March 5-9, 2023At the “Novel Photonic Devices and Applications” session (held on Thursday, March 9 from 8:00AM-10:00 AM PST) Saxena and Ph.D. candidate Md Jubayer Shawon will present “Automatic In-situ OpticalLinearization of Silicon Photonic Ring-Assisted MZ Modulator for Integrated RF Photonic SoCs” (Th1A.2This talk will feature results on the challenging problem of obtaining a highly linear response fromsilicon-based RF-to-optical modulators, which are important to the field of integrated photonics forfuture wireless systems, as well as the integration of bulky communication equipment on a single chip.The ultimate goal of this project is to make flexible radio transceivers capable of seamlessly switchingbetween radiofrequency, satellite, GPS, and the new millimeter-wave bands. The technology is also instrumental for future low-cost 6G radio access networks (RANs).