Seminars and Events

CA DREAMS - Technical Seminar Series

Energy-Efficient Heterogeneous Photonics for Next Generation AI and Hardware Accelerators

Event Details

November 20, 2026

Join Zoom Webinar

Passcode: 862998

Host: Steve Crago
POC: Amy Kasmir

As Moore’s law, Dennard scaling, and the Von-Neumann bottleneck continually push the boundaries of conventional computing, there arises a need to seek alternative architectures, systems, and devices. On the other hand, AI/ML applications in mega-data centers and high-performance post-exa-scale computing will require an interconnect solution that scales in bandwidth and energy efficiency. This talk will first introduce a unique heterogeneous III-V quantum-dot-on-Si platform for high-performance optical interconnects and post-exa-scale computing systems. Key devices and architectures will be discussed that significantly improve bandwidth-density/energy-efficiency metrics by orders of magnitude. This lays the groundwork for exploring photonic in-memory neuromorphic computing leveraging our recent breakthroughs in non-volatile photonic devices: photonic memristors & photonic charge-trap memory. Lastly, the talk will explore on-going work involving visible photonics for quantum applications and 3D heterogeneous photonic integrated circuits.

Speaker Bio

Stan Cheung is currently an Associate Professor with North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. His research is multi-disciplinary and aims to advance integrated photonics in computational and communication systems research – this entails exploring novel heterogeneous semiconductor photonic devices, architectures/algorithms, and developing a deeper understanding of neuromorphic/quantum-inspired computation that lies closer to physics. He has accumulated > 135 journal and conference publications along with 38 U.S patents (50 + pending) and delivered multiple invited talks at international conferences around the world. He has made major key technical contributions to current U.S. government customer contracts and serves on the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology (VCAT) for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce. He is a member of IEEE and Optica and serves on multiple editorial boards with Nature Publishing Group and IEEE.