Photonics for a Better World

Anuja De Silva attending SPIE Advanced Lithography in San Jose, CA Meet the SPIE Faces of Photonics star of the week, SPIE Member Anuja De Silva. Anuja grew up in Sri Lanka and now resides in Albany, New York, where she works as a materials and process researcher in the Semiconductor Technology Research division of IBM. Speaking of her work, she says, "I develop new types of materials and processes that help us to scale the size of computer chips... It's hardware development for next-generation semiconductor devices." Anuja graduated with her Bachelor's in Chemistry from Mount Holyoke College and went on to get her Master's and PhD in Materials Chemistry from Cornell University. Upon conducting a research project for her undergraduate degree, she found her passion for optics and materials research. Anuja and husband Nelson Felix attend SPIE Advanced Lithography together. The couple both work at IBM. "I have always been interested in math and scie...

Harvesting, collecting, and deriving usable energy from the Sun and other sustainable sources for people around our planet has made important leaps forward of late. Whether it is summer or winter in your part of the world, that’s excellent news for our future energy needs. The dual nature of light, recently demonstrated in an image from the Carbone group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and featured as Figure 1 in a review paper in the Journal of Photonics for Energy : "Energy-space photography of light confined on a nanowire simultaneously shows both spatial interference and energy quantization." doi:10.1117/1.JPE.5.050997 An open-access article in the Journal of Photonics for Energy co-authored by nine international experts* details some of those advances. Here’s a short list from their review of the state of the art, titled "The role of photonics in energy." 1. Making cheaper and more efficient solar cells Today’s solar cells a...

The semiconductor industry has seen some trying times of late, but the energy feels strongly positive today, on the first day of the lithography community’s annual gathering in San Jose. And the perspective is strongly forward-looking, as evidenced by the first two talks at SPIE Advanced Lithography . The meeting began with all-symposium plenary talks, as it has for most of the 35 years it has been held. EUV was front-and-center in IMEC CEO Luc Van den hove ’s picture of the future; IMEC has invested in ASML’s new NXE3100 pre-production EUV lithography scanner. Van den hove shared his vision of how applications of semiconductor technology will further enhance human capabilities and presented the necessary device roadmap to make that vision a reality. Luc Van den hove (IMEC) "We are people of bits and bytes," he said. "Just imagine a day without your smart phone.” That demand, he noted, creates an increasingly large need to lower energy consumption to realize true...