Abstract
Moore’s Law has set great expectations that the performance/price ratio of commercially available semiconductor devices will continue to improve exponentially at least until the end of this decade. Although the physics of nanoscale silicon transistors alone could allow these expectations to (almost) be met, the physics of the metal wires that connect these transistors places stringent limits on the performance of integrated circuits. We will describe a CMOS-compatible global interconnect architecture --- based on chip-scale optical wavelength division multiplexing --- that could precipitate an "optical Moore's Law" and allow exponential performance gains until the transistors themselves become the bottleneck. Based on similar fabrication techniques and technologies, we will also present quantum approaches to optically-coupled information processors for computation beyond Moore's Law. For example, it may be possible to harness devices with explicitly quantum coherent behavior to perform reliable classical computations using quantum feedback control. As an initial step toward this goal, we have demonstrated ultrafast switching in microscale nonlinear optical devices fabricated in amorphous silicon and gallium arsenide, and we have developed a semi-quantum photonic circuit simulator to guide us as we layout photonic circuits with hundreds of coherently interacting elements.
Biography
Ray Beausoleil is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Fellow in Systems Research at Hewlett Packard Labs, and a Consulting Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. At HPE, he leads the Large-Scale Integrated Photonics research group, and is responsible for research on the applications of optics at the micro/nanoscale to high-performance classical and quantum information processing. His current projects include photonic interconnects for exascale computing, and low-power complex nanophotonic circuits. Ray received the Bachelor of Science with Honors in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1980; the Master of Science degree in Physics from Stanford University in 1984; and his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford in 1986 as a member of Ted Hansch's research group. In 1996, Ray became a member of the technical staff at HP Laboratories. Among his early accomplishments at HP, he invented the optical paper-navigation algorithms incorporated into the HP/Agilent optical mouse, and now HP's large-format printers. He has published over 300 papers and conference proceedings and five book chapters. He has over 115 patents issued, and over three dozen pending. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.