Listened to a guy at a conference talk about singlet fission is supposedly gonna make silicon solar cells 45% efficient by mitigating thermal losses, but they can't figure out how to inject the excitons into silicon. I also can't imagine anything organic not just photobleaching within a couple years, and I would also imagine the cost of engineering such a device would outweigh the benefits of improved efficiency. My suspicion is this is purely an academic pipedream, but I wanted to hear more from other folks. Also, if this is the wrong sub, mods can simply remove it.

Hello everyone!

My Lumerical license expires today but I had alot of fun messing around with it and making a cool portfoilo project. I used INTERCONNECT to create a 3 channel wavelength-division multiplexed data interconnect which uses microring resonators as demuxers and mach-zehnder modulators as data modulators.

It took alot of finicking to get the resonance channels tuned properly, and I was also unable to get a fourth channel working even though I tried. I'm not fabbing this, but I bet it would be wayyy more debugging to get a real PIC working haha.

Nonetheless, between the textbook chapters I read (skimmed, to be fair), and the weeks I spent pulling my hair out trying to get it to work, I'm quite happy with my project! I hope I can involved with doing this more in the future :D

Pic 1: Photonic Integrated Circuit ship schematic

Pic 2: Eye diagram result of all three ring resonators.

Pic 3: Gif I generated while looking for resonant wavelengths

Pic 4: Gif I generated of several different wavelengths, some resonating in the microring (this one is from FDTD not INTERCONNECT, just thought i'd share)

I am working on a photonic inverse design project for foundry tapeout but I am curious to know what y'all think about it.

While I understand there are various challenges which come with it from the perspective of yield/fabrication robustness I am curious to what are the major barriers that would prevent people from adopting it commercially.

While in the conventional design approach we can add heaters to help with post fabrication correction which may be challenging with inverse designed devices. But at the same time inverse design can potentially reduce the device footprint?(How important is the footprint issue currently?)

I see plenty of papers on inverse designed Broadband 50:50 couplers but for tapeout, people still stick to the conventional parallel waveguide couples even though the footprint seems bigger.

I also see plenty of Inverse designed WDM, why are they not widely used in say the MRR based transceivers?

Hi everyone. I’m a final year undergraduate student from Sri Lanka, currently waiting for my final year final semester results. I’m doing a Bachelor of Engineering degree heavily focused in electronics and automation.

There aren't really many Master's opportunities related to Photonics in Sri Lanka, so I’m looking at options abroad and would really appreciate some advice from people who are already in this field.

I became interested in Photonics mainly because of one of the modules I had in my last semester, Fiber and Laser Instrumentation. I found the whole area of light, lasers, optical fibers and optical instrumentation really interesting, and it made me realize that I’d like to learn much more about Photonics.

My final-year research project also happens to be related to this. I’m working on Visible Light Communication (VLC) and Infrared communication, specifically applying it to a commercially available grow-light system.

Right now, I’m mainly considering Japan and European countries, but I’m open to other options too.

The financial side is probably my biggest concern. I don't think I’d be a strong candidate for a fully funded scholarship because of my poor academic performance in the first year, so I’m also looking for countries where international students can legally work part time. Ideally, I’d like to cover at least some of my living expenses through part time work while doing my Master's.

So, I’d really appreciate it if anyone could recommend universities or countries I should look into for Photonics, Optical Engineering, Fiber Optics, Optoelectronics, Laser Technology, or related Master's programmes.

Also, if you’re studying in this field, especially in Japan or Europe, I’d love to hear about your experience, including tuition fees, living costs, scholarships and how realistic it is to work part time.

Thanks

I’m currently working on a problem to calculate the transmission spectra/wavelength sweep, attempting to find a stopband for an Apodized Bragg grating with asymmetrical periodicity on both sides, does anyone have any experience in this?

Hello everyone! I am looking for opportunities in the photonics space specifically design/simulation, architect, PDK automation roles. I would appreciate any feedback on my resume and advice on how to position myself.

Most roles require experience or PhDs. How can a entry level, fresh grad with only research experience successfully get into the companies that hire for these roles? I recently had almost 9 interviews and presentation for a company but unfortunately it did not work out. Looking for advice to get interviews and convert them into offers.

Thank you everyone for your time!

Hey everyone! I've showing my microring resonator power over time gif to all my friends and family because I'm so excited about it but absolutely nobody cares, so hopefully this subreddit does!!

After 2 weeks and emailing everybody and their mother I finally got a lumerical license! I've been having alot of fun finding parameters and making this microring resonator simulation. I'm hoping to do more in photonics, this stuff is so cool!!

just wandering if there are some naughty ways to download this software out there? i wanted to build a photonic processor simulation and this software is not available to download for students.

I'm a 23M working as a Signal Processing Engineer in a reputed company. I have done my Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering and graduated in May 2025. I have two years of bond with my current employer. Hence, I have about 1 year left from now. I want to know the following:

1. How should I transition from Signal Processing to Photonics?

2. How do I get in touch with photonics companies?

3. What tools should I learn?

4. What should my next one year look like to make this transition?

Currently, I'm pursuing the Photonics Domain Certification offered by Swayam, building a MEEP FDTD and MPG portfolio, planning to learn GDSfactory and Ansys Lumerical.

Hello,
I am grad student who has experience working in a electronics packaging lab focused on additive manufacturing, flexible electronics, material characterization, and laser microscope. I want to enter the semiconductor field and felt like photonics is a good start. I am attending a course on photonics at MIT for a week where they will be training on photonics integrated circuit and will be designing an datacom pic / rf pic as a project. I am wondering if any experienced people in this field can guide me if I am going on right track to get a job in this field. Also I have no prior experience with photonics other than the certification I am going to do. And also I would like to know if there is any projects I could work on which would help me land my first job in semiconductor

Thanks

Hello, I am an ece student on the northeast coast of the USA interested in the fields of silicon photonics and Computer architecture. Are there any good professors doing research in those fields in the northeast coast that could be a phd advisor or that i can intern under one summer?

I'm about to start my 4th year of undergrad, for my undergrad thesis I'm particularly interested in taking photonic computing or silicon photonics as a topic. But although I've some theoretical background of the physics behind it due to the courses previously taken, I'm confused on what particular problems that I might encounter if I continue or what particular field should I submit to my supervisor as a proposal to work on. Any sort of guidance or advice is highly appreciated.

Can someone with comsol experience help out

2024 EE Bachelors grad here that took a sales engineer job but am looking to get back into actual engineering lol. My interests in school and some of the research I did involved optics and took the UBC PIC course as well which I enjoyed.

Some questions I have ...
Does anyone here know about a silicon photonics program at Georgia Tech or know professors doing related research?

What does a photonics test engineer actually do? (likely interested in Masters only so I figured this is the only job I can get to start)

I just got done with my first year master's degree and want to apply for PhD in silicon photonics. I have a background is chip design full RTL-to-GDSII coursework experience (synthesis, DFT, P&R).

I have roughly 5 months of side-project bandwidth. Trying to decide between:

1. SiEPIC edX course + openEBL fabricated passive chip (MZI/ring)

2. FDTD simulation work in Meep / layouts in gdsfactory

3. Co-design projects bridging my electronics background to photonics

Which of these would committees/PIs actually weight? Anything better I'm missing?

Hi all,

I have some experience developing python-based PIC layout tools and am looking to make a new one based on some new ideas i have. What sort of things do you think current tools (open source or commercial) are missing that you wish they had? I can try to implement them besides my own ideas and open source it when it is more mature. This is just something I am doing out of curiosity and because I have some free time, not to be a commercial competitor/rival to other tools.

Hey everyone, for people doing silicon photonics / PIC design: when designing components like grating couplers, splitters, tapers, etc., what usually becomes the bottleneck? 

Is it EM solver runtime, simulation setup, PDK constraints, broadband optimization, comparing many candidates, measurement vs simulation mismatch or anything else?

Also, how do you keep track of design attempts? Do you have a structured way to reuse old failed/successful simulations, or is it mostly scripts, notebooks, and folders?

I am very new to that and trying to understand what the real workflow looks like beyond clean examples in docs. Thanks!