Silicon Photonics Panel Returns to Photonics West

Silicon photonics and photonic integrated circuit technology will be discussed by a panel of five industry leaders at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco in February.

The well-attended Silicon Photonics and Photonic Integrated Circuits panel is back again this year; the forum will examine technology that is on the brink of revolutionizing computing with smaller, cheaper optical interconnects, impacting fields from communications and security to biomedicine and entertainment. Topics up for discussion will include R&D progress and leveraging this disruptive technology.

“This panel provides a unique opportunity to hear what’s new from the people defining the future, and to ask questions of these industry leaders face-to-face,” said moderator Peter Hallett, SPIE director of marketing and industry relations. “Impending advances in silicon photonics will help create a new market of miniaturized photonic components that can leverage the scale of complementary CMOS manufacturing.”

The panel members are as follows:

Peter De Dobbelaere, vice president of engineering at Luxtera. He was the former leader of product development and reliability of polymer-based thermo-optic waveguide switches at Akzo-Nobel, and chieft technology officer and director of product engineering and reliability at OMM, the former photonic switch maker.

Ashok Krishnamoorthy, chief technologist in photonics at Oracle and principal investigator for the Oracle Labs DARPA UNIC initiative on silicon “photonics to the processor.” He is the former director of Sun Microsystems.

Radha Nagarajan, director of engineering in Infinera’s photonic integrated circuits group. Nagarajan previously was the development manager of SDL’s new-generation 980-nm pump, which won the Photonics Circle of Excellence Award in 2000.

Mario Paniccia, SPIE Fellow and general manager of Intel Corp.’s silicon photonics operations, where his team pioneered several activities in silicon photonics, including the first continuous-wave silicon laser in 2005 and, with the University of Santa Barbara, the first hybrid silicon laser in 2006; he was named R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year in 2008.

Andy Weirich, vice president of product line management at OneChip Photonics. He is the former vice president of products and technology at Ciena Networks, and co-founder and vice president of system architecture at Catena Networks.

In addition to the panel, there will be more than 100 technical presentations on silicon photonics and photonic integrated circuits; a short course on silicon photonics will be taught by Jurgen Michel of MIT.

For more information, visit: www.spie.org