{"id":7160,"date":"2026-04-15T10:11:02","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.und.edu\/cem\/?p=7160"},"modified":"2026-04-15T10:11:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:11:02","slug":"jobayer-hossain-und-on-ai-impacting-inverse-design-for-photonic-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.und.edu\/cem\/2026\/04\/jobayer-hossain-und-on-ai-impacting-inverse-design-for-photonic-devices\/","title":{"rendered":"Jobayer Hossain, UND: On AI impacting inverse design for photonic devices"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Editor’s note:<\/strong> The article below was first published by Microelectronics US and can be read on their website<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

How can artificial intelligence help in the building of smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient photonic devices? One such way is through inverse design.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In traditional forward design, you start with a structure and through understanding and applying the maths, be they Maxwell\u2019s equations or similar, you tune certain parameters until the design goal is met. Inverse design, not surprisingly, takes the opposite approach, with the desired optical response being the starting point and algorithms altering the structure until the goal is met. As an article from\u00a0the Photonics and Nanostructures<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 Fundamentals and Applications\u00a0journal\u00a0puts\u00a0it,\u00a0whereas\u00a0forward design\u00a0puts\u00a0structure first, inverse design\u00a0generally puts\u00a0the performance first.<\/p>\n

\"A
Jobayer Hossain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Dr. Jobayer Hossain<\/a><\/strong>, assistant professor at the University of North Dakota\u2019s School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science<\/a><\/strong>, understanding how tools such as AI can support inverse design is one of his key research areas.<\/p>\n

Hossain co-authored\u00a0no fewer than\u00a0three papers for the IEEE Photonics Conference back in 2023. One explored\u00a0inverse design of silicon photonics components<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0from a deep learning perspective. While his work has mostly been at the device\u00a0level, he notes there is potential to extend the same approach for circuit level design, as well as some aspects of system level work.<\/p>\n

\u201cForward design is more human-centric,\u201d Hossain explains. \u201cEvery time we have a new device, we\u00a0basically go\u00a0through the same process. We keep tuning the device structure and parameters until we reach the target characteristics.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor inverse design, sometimes we can have non-intuitive design coming directly from the machine learning and deep learning,\u201d he adds. \u201cThat can give us a very small footprint, very low-power devices, which was not possible using the forward design method.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0for all the promise, there is\u00a0a caveat. The device still needs to be manufacturable. \u201cIt needs to be process variation tolerant,\u201d says Hossain. \u201cFrom this inverse design approach, it can have very sharp corners, like one nanometre or two nanometre feature size, which may not be possible to fabricate repeatedly.\u00a0So\u00a0we need to ensure that the device we fabricate\u2026 gives us this consistent result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following stints at AIM Photonics and Phase Sensitive Innovations, Hossain made the move back to academia. He explains that he appreciates the\u00a0\u2018space for free thinking and innovation\u2019 it provides. \u201c[In academic research,] we have the luxury of taking more risk,\u201d he notes. \u201cCertain ideas may fail, and we can take that, but in industry, if that happens, you are out of business. In academia, our failure, our success\u2026 everything is learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

One such learning was in a recent paper Hossain and his team published on low-loss, low-crosstalk\u00a0arrayed waveguide grating<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(AWG)\u00a0on a 300mm silicon photonics platform.<\/p>\n

AWGs, Hossain notes, are\u00a0rather like\u00a0a prism \u2014 just as a prism separates white light into its constituent\u00a0colors, an AWG separates a combined optical signal into its individual wavelengths.\u00a0Their integration with semiconductor optical amplifiers, detectors,\u00a0modulators\u00a0and switches help create complex photonic integrated circuits (PICs), with applications across LiDAR, to spectral imaging, to neuromorphic computing and AI accelerators. \u201cIt\u2019s, of course, one component or one device of a whole system, but it\u2019s a crucial device,\u201d notes Hossain.<\/p>\n

Hossain is keen to avoid the valley of death, the key gap between scientific discovery and\u00a0practical\u00a0application, for his cohort of students and researchers. The funding agencies, he notes, emphasise bridging that gap \u2013 and this points to another\u00a0reason why\u00a0he moved back to academia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to use my experience in industry, and bring those insights, and would like to use those to train the next generation of engineers,\u201d says Hossain. \u201cI enjoy following curiosity, and I would like to solve problems, but I want to pursue real-world problems with [an] academic perspective. My mindset is [on] real-world problem solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hossain is\u00a0participating\u00a0at\u00a0Microelectronics US<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on April 22-23 where he will be the one asking the questions,\u00a0moderating\u00a0a panel session on the future of the data centre with photonics technologies. So, how does he assess the proposition?<\/p>\n

\u201cPhotonics is already transforming the data centres because we had certain limitation from the electrical interconnects,\u201d says Hossain. \u201cPhotonic interconnect comes inherently with huge bandwidth, low power consumption, so it is already being used. There are certain bottlenecks, certain challenges, even in photonics. Co-packaged optics\u2026 has certain challenges, like how do we couple light\u00a0[between components]\u00a0with low loss? How do we pack\u00a0more and more\u00a0components within a small area? How do we do thermal isolation?<\/p>\n

\u201cI will be asking all of these questions to the panellists and try to get answers for the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor’s note: The article below was first published by Microelectronics US and can be read on their website. How can artificial intelligence help in the building of smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient photonic devices? One such way is through inverse design.\u00a0 In traditional forward design, you start with a structure and through understanding and applying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":7162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[902],"class_list":["post-7160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-school-of-electrical-engineering-computer-science"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJobayer Hossain, UND: On AI impacting inverse design for photonic devices - College of Engineering & Mines<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.und.edu\/cem\/2026\/04\/jobayer-hossain-und-on-ai-impacting-inverse-design-for-photonic-devices\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jobayer Hossain, UND: On AI impacting inverse design for photonic devices - College of Engineering & Mines\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor’s note: The article below was first published by Microelectronics US and can be read on their website. 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