This talk summarizes the recent R&D progress of epitaxial Ge lasers, bulk-Ge-based light emitters, and Ge-VCSELs, especially the research efforts from the author’s research group and her collaborators.

The balance between human existence and microchip benefits is being severely challenged by a relentless and unsustainable appetite for electronics consumption. For the first time in more than 40 years, the semiconductor microchip industry is confronted with limits to transistor size, to its environmental footprint, and to its workforce pipeline readiness. We have established a global microchip sustainability project called FUTUR-IC, which creates self-consistent 3D technology, ecology, and workforce research solutions to sustain the continued progress of the semiconductor manufacturing and the information systems industry. FUTUR-IC will enable companies to make multi-dimensional decisions based on the consequences for people, planet, and profits. The Chip Scaling Era has ended, and the Package/System Scaling Era is now in full implementation with no long-term technology roadmap. To maintain performance scaling: i) incremental technology change is insufficient, and ii) supply chain sustainability in terms of workforce quality, materials criticality, and manufacturing effluent has no inherent scaling vector. Economic risk for the nation has never been so large, and rarely been so dependent on a particular technology evolution. This transformation to chip/package scaling is not a task that any one sector can tackle in isolation; it requires a robust global alliance that unites academia, industry, government, and community. FUTUR-IC offers such collective research projects and partnerships to pave the way for innovative solutions, ensuring a resilient and prosperous technological future.

High power and high energy optical systems find various applications. Not surprisingly, such systems are associated with large benchtop fiber and solid-state systems owing mainly to their large energy storage capacity and high gain saturation power. Integrated photonics on the other hand, due to their small size, which enables miniaturization, do not offer high power functionality. In this talk, I will present our work on high energy (10s of nanojoule), and high power (>1 W) lasers and amplifiers which are based on the large-mode-area waveguide technology on a compact silicon photonics chip.

Computational electrodynamics is ubiquitous in nanophtonics modelling. I will describe our in-house electrodynamics software that goes beyond usual FDTD, in order to model complex light matter interactions on the nanoscale (including nonlinear and time-dependent materials) as well as our approach to the inverse design of complex light-matter interactions.