Professor John Bowers honored with 23rd William Gould Dow Distinguished Lectureship
Mena Davidson, University of Michigan
May 14, 2025
Bowers gave an overview of historical and current research on integrating silicon photonics and lasers into circuits.
John Bowers, entrepreneur and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received the 23rd William Gould Dow Distinguished Lectureship. He visited North Campus to give his lecture, “Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits with Integrated Lasers,” on April 11, 2025.
“Silicon photonics is still growing really rapidly as a field,” said Bowers, Director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency. “The demand of AI on data centers is growing much faster than the performance of our computing and memory chips. That means we need to get many more lanes of ‘traffic’ onto these chips. That basically drives photonic integration.”
Silicon photonics involves the transfer of information via light rather than electricity. One big goal of the field today, Bowers explained, is replacing traditional copper with fiber optics. Bowers focused his talk on integrating lasers into chips, which can reduce the costs of applications including data- and telecommunications, lidar, artificial and virtual reality, optical and quantum computing, and biosensing.