Cadence Hosts Fifth Annual Photonics Event

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CadenceCONNECT hosts the fifth annual Cadence Photonics event, December 1-3 on a virtual platform. The title this year is Photonics Contribution to High-Performance Computing.

Driven by the exponential growth in data and the need for high performance with low power, photonics is becoming a disrupting force in high-performance computing (HPC) architectures. The unique properties of light make it possible to create innovative low-power processing chiplets. However, these need to be connected to traditional electronics systems to realize their true potential. 

This is the 5th Photonics Summit. Each has had a different focus:

• 1st year: Basic datacom
• 2nd year: Datacom and a little about integration
• 3rd year: Impact of photonics on everyday life, plus sensors and lidar workshop
• 4th year. Analog datacomm, RF
• This year: Putting together a system with photonics elements

The format of the meeting is that each day there will be a morning session (Pacific time) from 8:00am to 11:00am. Then, since everything is recorded, the session will be repeated from 5:00pm to 8:00pm (Pacific time), which is the morning in Asia (9:00am in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, or 10:00am in Japan). The one difference is that the third day ends with a  30-minute live Q&A which won't be repeated for the afternoon session. So the morning session will end at 11:30am and the evening session will be 5:00pm to 8:00pm, the same as the other days.

December 1
The day opens with a keynote: Photonic Integration – From Switching to Computing by Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur of McGill University. Professor Liboiron-Ladouceur holds a Canadian Research Chair in the area of Photonic Integration for data communications and emerging applications such as computing for AI. She leads the photonic datacomm team.

• Programming General-Purpose Photonic Processors, by Daniel Pérez López of iPronics
• The Transition to Chip-to-Chip Optical I/O, by Mark Wades of PAyar Labs
• Embedding Photonics into DRAM – Motivation, Lessons, and Leftovers, by DongJae Shin of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology

December 2

• Near-Term Photonic Quantum Computing on the Cloud, Zach Vernon of Xanadu
• Quantum Integrated Photonics, by Michael Fanto of AFRL
• Design and Simulation of Quantum Photonic Circuits by James Pond of ANSYS. James was the CTO of Lumerical (that Ansys acquired) and I interviewed him a couple of years ago during that year's summit, which you can read about in my post An Illuminating Chat with Lumerical's CTO.
• Analog Optical Accelerators for Neuromorphic Computing, by Bert Jan Offrein of IBM

December 3

• Efficient Assembly and Packaging for Photonics by Alexander Janta-Polczynski of IBM
• Photonic Wirebonds for Silicon Photonics: Early Results From SiEPICfab, by Lukas Chrostowski of University of British Columbia
• Optical Connections with Polymer Ribbons, by Thomas L. Koch of University of Arizona
• Rochester Test Assembly Packaging Facility for Photonics Systems - Research Project Update, by Ed White of AIM
• Foundations for Scalable Chip-to-Chip Connectivity by Hesham Taha, of Teramount Ltd.

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