SPIE

SPIE is a worldwide organization focused on optics and photonics. Our mission is to enhance the global community in this field through various means, including conferences, publications, and professional training. We connect engineers, scientists, students, and industry experts to promote advancements in light-based science and technology. Over the last five years, we have invested over $22 million to support the international optics community, driven by our belief in the positive impact of photonics on lives around the world.

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Building beyond Earth: What’s in it for photonics?

1 month ago | spie.org | Rebecca Pool

When Sputnik launched on 4 October, 1957, it was the first human-made object to orbit Earth. The Russian satellite reached space atop a R-7 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, prompted the establishment of NASA, and triggered the Space Race. Yet, despite the admiration — and fear — that Sputnik sparked around the world at the time, few could have fathomed the sheer numbers of spacecraft that followed.
Getting PFAS out of lithography materials

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

Unlike what happens in Las Vegas, what happens in a wafer fab doesn’t stay there. That’s why the use of PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) materials in semiconductor manufacturing is a concern. In lithography, PFAS plays crucial roles in the patterning of photoresist, and they present long term health and environmental hazards.
Other lithography approaches offer alternatives

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

Most semiconductor lithography involves projecting a mask pattern onto a photoresist coated wafer, developing the exposed resist, and using that resist to transfer the pattern onto layers of insulators, conductors, and other circuit elements on the wafer. Repeating this process over and over eventually creates a complete integrated circuit like a microprocessor or memory.
Chips - and lithography - head up and down

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

Chips are headed up and down. So, lithography and related technologies will help that happen, according to presentations at the 2025 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference. Moore’s Law calls for a doubling of transistor counts within a packaged device every two years. For decades lithography and patterning enabled this scaling up in transistor density. Transistors got smaller in length, width, and height, allowing more of them to be packed into a given area.
AI’s impact: Three examples

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

AI in the form of ChatGPT and other large language models showed up in many of the presentations at the 2025 SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference. The demands of AI, for instance, on top of all the other markets for semiconductors will drive the overall semiconductor market to more than a trillion dollars by 2030, up from an estimated $642 billion in 2024. That growth results in a need for more chips.
VCSEL's star still shining bright

1 month ago | spie.org | Neil Savage

Kent Choquette thought the type of lasER he’d spent his career developing was doing pretty well in 2017. That device, the vertical cavity surface-emitting laser, or VCSEL, had seen remarkable success since it was first introduced commercially in 1996, and by 2017 an estimated one billion of the tiny devices had been sold, mostly for use in optical interconnects for data centers.
Photonics aids the march of Moore's Law

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

Imagine technology development without Moore’s Law, where the doubling of device transistors every two years ceases. In this scenario, a smartphone bought five years from now would have no more processing power, memory storage, and connectivity speed than today’s models. Data centers a decade hence will balloon even more in size, because they will need many more servers to perform the computationally heavy tasks demanded by AI. Even cars, 20 years into the future, won’t be any smarter than today’s.
Richard A. Soref: On pioneering silicon photonics

1 month ago | spie.org | William G. Schulz

At this year’s SPIE Photonics West symposium, a three-day conference track was devoted to silicon photonics, the material platform for photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Hundreds of talks—ranging from the design of photonic circuits and devices to quantum dot light sources and everything in between—were testament to the field’s growth and attraction, particularly with the rise of data- and power-hungry applications like artificial intelligence.
Accounting for sustainability in lithography

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

Like others at the 2025 Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, Emily Gallagher, sustainability program director at imec, mentioned the exponential growth of AI demand, during a talk on Monday. Her focus was sustainability. During her presentation, she covered a particular consequence of that growing AI demand: the construction and operation of data centers. “As we build these data centers, we are adding emissions,” she said.
Lithography and AI and quantum computing

1 month ago | spie.org | Hank Hogan

In two plenary talks on Tuesday at the 2025 Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference, speakers from ASML and IBM explored the lithography challenges associated with AI and quantum computing. Overcoming those challenges would expand the computing toolbox, making it possible to do calculations and solve problems impossible to do with today’s technology.