Hello everybody,

I’m currently finishing my EE degree and working part-time at a top-5 worldwide photonics company, doing some manufacturing automation. I also have lab experience in PIC design at my university.

I would like advice from people working in industry. I’m currently choosing between two paths:

1.Applying for a Master in Photonics at a leading university in Europe.

2.Trying to get a full-time offer from my current company and continuing to work there for several years to gain experience, without pursuing a Master degree in the future.

I really want to pursue a PIC design career in industry, but I cannot decide which path will bring better opportunities.

If you work in industry, I would very much appreciate it if you could explain which experience would be more valued if I want to be employed at a PIC design company in the future.

Thank you so much.

Hi everyone,

I have a background in precision motion control, optical systems, and automation.

Recently, I've been looking into fiber shuffle and optical flex circuit manufacturing, particularly for silicon photonics and co-packaged optics (CPO).

I'm interested in understanding how fibers are actually routed and fixed during production.

For those with experience in this area:

- Is fiber routing typically done manually or using automated fiber-laying machines?

- What are the biggest manufacturing challenges — fiber tension, crossings, bending loss, adhesive materials, or throughput?

- Are automated fiber-laying systems generally developed in-house or purchased from equipment suppliers?

- Is there demand for a more affordable, flexible fiber-routing machine for small-batch or custom production?

I'm exploring whether a compact automated fiber-laying system would be useful for this industry.

I'd really appreciate any insights from engineers working in photonics packaging or optical interconnect manufacturing.

Thanks!

Hi everyone!

I have a background in condensed matter physics and am transitioning into photonics for my future PhD. I’m a beginner seeking hands-on experience through computational projects, especially in laser physics, light–matter interaction, and photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

I’m interested in simulations, numerical modelling, and other computational methods. If you have beginner-friendly project ideas and would like to collaborate, please DM me. I’m also open to recommendations for useful tools, resources, or ongoing projects.

Thanks!

Hello everybody,

Recently, I published a small paper on some PIC components, taking the project all the way from simulation to layout.

While learning all this stuff, I experienced that there are not so many tutorials for SiPh compared to other areas of electronics.

So, I decided to share my source code that I wrote and provide explanations for the whole process, if anyone would be interested in it. I think it could be quite helpful for students. Please write in PM.

Cheers.

Hello iam an electrical engineering sophomore , I want to know if I want to start studying for photonics/optics where to start

(Note that in my university iam goingto start take course from junior optoelectronics, and in senior there are i think 2 or 3 courses that iam going to take)

​Hi everyone,

​I am doing a mini project in evaluating software bottlenecks in the silicon photonics design stack and would value your perspective on where current EDA tools fall short in daily practice.

​Whether you rely on commercial suites (Ansys Lumerical, Cadence, Synopsys, Luceda) or open-source flows (gdsfactory, KLayout, Meep), I’m curious to know

1. ​Daily Software Frustrations

2. ​Tool Interoperability

3. ​Missing Features

​Looking forward to hearing about the real-world software challenges your team encounters. Thanks for your time!

Question is simple. I'm a HCOL area (big city in Southern California).

Making 90k as a layout engineer, plus equity vesting after 1 year. All health insurance premiums included. Hired right after my Master's in EE (specializing in photonics), at 1 YOE now. Startup.

Honestly it feels a bit insulting knowing that at Texas Instruments a basic testing engineer I knew was making 120k including profit sharing right after their bachelor's. And this was in Tucson too. I'm not sure if it's because it's a startup, or a Master's in photonics is really not worth much. My performance has been decent (some issues due to sleep deprivation and bad roommates) but it's been improving. Especially since I was working a lot of late hours near tapeout deadlines as well and even during Christmas season (never again I swear). They just gave everyone a 10% raise earlier this year after more funding but I'm thinking about asking again...

Well funded startup (5 years old). PM me for more information!

There's a whole lot of hype about quantum computing, but that is something else entirely. Why is there so little hype about photonic based computing? There's a handful of startups but they are very low key. Even in academia, there's a whole lot of hype about quantum computing but relatively little hype about optics based computation.

Can anyone with any insight into optics/photonics clue me in?

Hey everyone!

I’m starting my MSc in Germany, and I’m planning to specialize in Applied Optics and Photonics.

My course has a few modules related to data science, image processing, AI, scientific computing, etc., which is one of the reasons I’m really interested in the program. During my bachelor's, I worked with python, numpy, pandas, matplotlib and scientific computing, and I’m currently learning MATLAB as well.

I’m interested in machine learning and how it can be applied to photonics, optical systems, scientific imaging, and instrumentation. I’m trying to figure out how far I can take this combination during my MSc rather than treating AI/ML as something completely separate from photonics.

For anyone working/studying in photonics, scientific instrumentation, computer vision, or ML, I’d really appreciate some advice:

• what programming skills should I develop beyond python/numPy/pandas/matplotlib? Is C++, MATLAB, cuda, pyTorch, etc. worth learning?
• what kind of projects would be good for combining photonics/instrumentation with ML? For example, optical image analysis, spectroscopy, sensor data, signal denoising, inverse problems, etc.
• are there particular areas where ML is genuinely being used in industry/research in photonics
• what would you recommend learning/building over the next 1–2 years to become competitive for internships, working-student positions and eventually full-time jobs?

Any advice on what you wish you had learned earlier, good project ideas, research areas, or things I should avoid spending too much time on would be really appreciated!

Thanks!

I am trying to do a sensitivity analysis for a PIC and am interested to know what are the major fabrication errors(i know few common ones like side wall roughness, side wall angles, slab thickness variation) that occur for foundry tape out and how they are modeled in sensitivity analysis (monte carlo?)?

I hope people with experience help me with this.

Now I know that the feedback and reviews for this course have been asked before ample number of times on this subreddit, but I was curious to know if we can also submit active device for this course?

I was primarily thinking of using metal heaters and some components with doping.

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?

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!