Michael Hochberg video - OpSIS

OpSIS is a foundry service for silicon photonics in which the community shares the cost of fabricating complex chip-scale systems across many projects.

The goal at OpSIS is to make the processes for making optoelectronic integrated circuits available to the community at large, at modest cost, by sharing the cost of processing across many users of a single mask set. This model -- called a "shuttle" -- can reduce costs of building new silicon photonics devices by more than 100x. The OpSIS program will help advance the field by bringing prototyping capability within reach of startups and academic research groups.

OpSIS provides design rules, device design support, and assistance with design-flow development so that even non-specialists can design and build functioning chips that integrate photonics and electronics. OpSIS coordinates regular shuttle runs and manages the relationships with its foundry partners.

Michael Hochberg is director of OpSIS and associate professor at the University of Delaware. He was previously an associate professor at the University of Washington. He received his BS (Physics, 2002), his MS (Applied Physics, 2005) and his PhD (Applied Physics, 2006) from Caltech, and he was awarded the Demetriades-Tsafka Prize in Nanotechnology for the best dissertation by a graduating Ph.D. student in the field of Nanotechnology. As a graduate student, he worked on developing integrated nonlinear optical devices using silicon photonics. He received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) in 2009. Hochberg was interviewed for SPIE Newsroom at SPIE Photonics West in January 2012.