155th meeting of The Lyncean Group of San Diego – 11:00 am, Wednesday, 29 July 2026
Location: Southwestern Yacht Club
2702 Qualtrough Street, San Diego, CA 92106 (Point Loma)
Speaker: Dr. Shaya Fainman
ASML/Cymer Chair and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE),
Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD)
Topic: Foundry enabled chip-scale photonics technology and applications.
Speaker bio: Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman is ASML/Cymer Chair and Distinguished Professor of ECE at UCSD. He received the M. Sc and Ph. D degrees from Technion in 1979 and 1983, respectively. His current research interests are in near field optical science and technology with applications targeting information technologies. He contributed over 360 manuscripts in peer review journals and is a recipient of numerous awards and distinctions.
Some Lyncean members may remember that Dr. Fainman spoke to the Group once before, on 6 September 2013. Here’s a link to his presentation, “Nanophotonics Technology and Applications”: https://lynceans.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/fainman.pdf.
His upcoming presentation will provide insights into the substantial progress made in chip-scale photonic device development, their relatively near-term applications in advanced wireless communications systems and their longer-term applications in advanced computing systems.
Abstract: Dense photonic integration requires miniaturization of materials, devices, circuits and systems, including passive components (e.g., engineered composite metamaterials, filters, etc.), active components (e.g., modulators and nonlinear wave mixers) and integrated circuits (Fourier transform spectrometer, programmable phase modulator of free space modes, linear algebra processors, etc.). In this talk we will discuss recent progress in developing CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) compatible nonlinear optical materials such as silicon rich nitride (SRN) as well as examples of foundry enabled silicon photonic circuits and systems. Specifically, we will review silicon photonics-based Fourier transform spectrometers. Moreover, taking advantage of nanofabrication we will discuss on-chip spectrometers using stratified waveguide filters and machine learning. Moving forward, we will discuss chip-scale integrated circuit/system that will allow to realize linear algebra accelerators with superior performance in speed, energy consumption and size compared to its electronic counterpart. Such system can be manufactured using monolithic CMOS process and impact such applications as 5G/6G and beyond wireless MIMO (Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output ) systems as well as deep learning and artificial intelligence.
Invitations with further details will be e-mailed to Lyncean Group members about three weeks before the meeting.
+++
