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A Circuit- and Device-Level Photonic Design Course 

With the end of Moore’s law scaling of processors, heterogeneous chiplet-based integration in package, and parallelism, are scaling computation to keep up with the deluge of emerging data-intensive applications including machine learning.  Silicon photonics-based multi-wavelength optical links, based on ring-resonator technology, are emerging as the inevitable path to the high-bandwidth densities and low energies per bit needed to support these new integrated systems in the post-Moore era.  Such links are an excellent example of the increasing complexity of silicon-photonic systems on chip, which are bringing about the need for both circuit-level and device-level simulation and design.  In this course, Prof. Miloš Popović (BU), who has spent two decades developing microring-based technology, will cover the design of a microring-based silicon-photonic transceiver chip.  The course will focus on circuit-level evaluation of the photonic part of the link design, and drill down to a highly-detailed design of a tunable ring filter as part of the link.  You will learn the underlying theory and design principles and intuition, and use a number of software tools, including Synopsys and Lumerical, to design a revision of the WDM link silicon chip in this 6-week synchronous course.