VLSI for Fibers- First Steps in Creating Data Processing Fiber Photonics

This webinar is hosted By: Fiber Modeling and Fabrication Technical Group

20 April 2026 15:00 - 16:00
Eastern Daylight/Summer Time (US & Canada) (UTC -04:00)

Fiber optics – the workhorse of digital communication – awaits the performance leap enabling it to plug the emerging computational platforms, such as quantum and neuromorphic, into the post-Moore’s law Internet of tomorrow. Such a fiber will need to translate the data across a variety of platforms, in each of which it’s encoded in a platform-specific form. Integrating on-the-fly data transformation capabilities into fibers is likely to entail embedding photonic data processing directly into the fiber itself.

Inspired by the VLSI design of modern microprocessors, we melt-shape multimaterial fiber cores into architectures typical of integrated circuits to realize fiber-embedded photonics. We dubbed this fabrication approach “VLSI for Fibers.”

Subject Matter Level: Intermediate- Assumes basic knowledge of the topic

What You Will Learn:
• How VLSI design principles translate to fiber platforms.
• Fabrication pathways for fiber-embedded photonics.
• Why active, processing-enabled fibers matter for post-Moore’s-law systems.

Who Should Attend:
• Graduate students, postdocs, and faculty in Physics of Devices, Photonics, Materials Science, EE, ME, and Bioengineering who are interested in next-generation fiber architectures, multimaterial fabrication, and non-planar photonic integration.
• Researchers and engineers working on post-Moore’s-law systems—including optical interconnects, quantum technologies, and neuromorphic computing—are seeking to understand how active, processing-enabled fibers could complement or extend planar PIC approaches.
• Industry and government-lab technologists involved in advanced photonics, specialty fibers, or emerging compute platforms who want early exposure to research-stage concepts likely to shape future fiber-based photonic systems.

About the Presenter: Alexander Gumennik from Indiana University FAMES Lab

Alexander Gumennik is Director of the Fibers & Additive Manufacturing Enabled Systems (FAMES) Laboratory in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. His research focuses on engineering multimaterial fibers and fabrics that integrate metals, semiconductors, and insulators to create active photonic, sensing, and transducing systems that bridge the physical and digital worlds. A central theme of his work is recursive manufacturing, combining thermal fiber drawing with additive manufacturing to enable scalable, monolithic fabrication of functional fiber devices and networks for applications ranging from environmental sensing and bio-synthetic interfaces to medical implants and IoT infrastructure. Before joining Indiana University, Dr. Gumennik served as a Lead Photonics Process Engineer at Formlabs and as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. His interests span photonic circuits, fiber-based and integrated nanophotonics, active textiles, distributed sensing, and nano-to-macro integration through additive manufacturing.

Thank you to our sponsor for their support of this technical group activity!