Congratulations to Prof. Ying XUE, Research Assistant Professor of the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA), for winning US$100,000 from the Optica Foundation Challenge 2023, which recognizes ten early-career professionals with exceptional ideas to leverage optics and photonics and address global challenges.

In her proposal “Monolithic III-V active devices in-plane coupled with Si for integrated Si-photonics”, Prof. XUE addresses the challenge of the staggering growth in the volume of data traffic which pushes the performance limits of Silicon-based integrated circuits and systems in present computing nodes and datacenters.

In an efficient, scalable and lost-cost manner, the novel design of integrating III-V active devices with silicon-based components on the same chip, will enable new-generation communications and various emerging applications and research areas, including supercomputers, artificial intelligence (AI), biomedicine, automotive applications, neural and quantum networks, sensing and LIDAR etc.