Squishy Photonic Switches Promise Fast Low Power Logic

Photonic devices, which rely on light instead of electricity, have the potential to be faster and more energy efficient than today’s electronics. They also present a unique opportunity to develop devices using soft materials, such as polymers and gels, which are poor conductors of electricity, but are easier to manufacture and more environmentally friendly. The development of these potentially squishy, flexible photonics, however, requires the ability to manipulate light using only light, not electricity.

In soft matter, that’s been done primarily by changing the physical properties of optical materials or by using intense light pulses to change the direction of light. Now, an international team of scientists has developed a new way of controlling light with light using very low light intensities and without changing any of the physical properties of materials.

Igor Muševič, a professor of physics at the University of Ljubljana who led the project, says that he first got the idea for the device while at a conference in San Francisco, listening to a talk by Stefan W. Hell about stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy. The imaging technique, for which Hell won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014, uses two lasers to produce an extremely small light beam to scan objects. “When I saw this, I said, this is manipulation light by light, right?” Muševič recalls.

His realization inspired a device into which a laser pulse is fired. Whether or not this beam makes it out of the device depends on whether or not a second pulse is fired less than a nanosecond afterwards.

A liquid crystal photonic switch

The device consists of a spherically-shaped bead of liquid crystal, held in shape by its elastic material properties and the forces between its molecules, infused with a fluorescent dye and trapped between four upright cone-shaped polymer structures that guide light in and out of the device. When a laser pulse is sent through one of the four polymer waveguides, the light is quickly transferred into the liquid crystal, exciting the fluorescent dye. In a process known as whispering gallery mode resonance, the photons inside the liquid crystal are reflected back inside each time they hit the liquid’s spherical surface. The result is that light circulates inside the cavity until it is eventually reflected into one of the waveguides, which then emits the photons out in a laser beam.

The team realized that sending a second laser pulse of a different color into the waveguides before the liquid crystal started emitting light from the first laser pulse resulted in stimulated emission of the excited dye molecules. The photons from the second laser pulse, which had to be fired into the waveguides after the first laser pulse, interact with the already-excited dye molecules. The interaction causes the dye to emit photons identical to those in the second pulse while depleting the energy from the first pulse. The second laser beam, called the STED beam, is amplified by the process, while the light from the first pulse is so diminished that it isn’t emitted at all. Because the outcome of the first laser pulse could be controlled using the second laser pulse, the team had successfully demonstrated the control of light by light.

According to the Ljubljana team, the energy efficiency of the liquid crystal approach is much better than previous soft-matter techniques, which had typically involved using intense light fields to change material properties of the soft matter, such as the index of refraction. The new method reduces the energy needed by more than a factor of a hundred. Because the STED laser pulse circulates repeatedly in the crystal, a single photon can deplete many dye molecules of the energy from the first laser pulse.

Miha Ravnik, a theoretical physicist also at the University of Ljubljana who worked on the project, explains that control of light by light is essential in soft-matter photonic logic gates. “You can very much control when [light] is generated and in which direction,” Ravnik says of the light shined into the polymer waveguides. “And this gives you, then, this capability that you create logical operations with light.”

Aside from its potential in photonic logical circuits, the team’s approach presents several technical advantages over photonics made from silicon or other hard materials, Muševič says. For example, using soft matter greatly simplifies the manufacturing process. The liquid crystal in the team’s device can be inserted in less than a second, but manufacturing a similar structure with hard materials is difficult. Additionally, soft matter devices can be manufactured at much lower temperatures than silicon and other hard materials. Muševič also points out that soft matter presents an opportunity to experiment with the geometry of the device. With liquid crystals “you can make many different kinds of cavities,” says Muševič. “You have, I would say, a lot of engineering space.”

Ravnik is excited for the potential of the team’s breakthrough, particularly as a step towards photonic computing and even photonic neural networks. But, he recognizes that these developments are far down the line. “There’s no way this technology can compete with current neural network implementation at all,” he admits. Still, the possibilities are tantalizing. “The energy losses are predicted to be extremely low, the speeds for calculation extremely high.”

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Working With More Experienced Engineers Can Fast-Track Career Growth

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!

The Worst Engineer in the Room

My salary doubled. My confidence tanked.

That’s what happened when I had just joined a five-person startup in San Francisco in my third year as a software engineer. Two of the founders had been recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30. The team was exceptional by any measure.

On my first day, someone made a joke about Dijkstra’s algorithm. Everyone laughed. I smiled along, then looked it up afterward so I could understand why it was funny. Dijkstra’s algorithm finds the shortest path between 2 points—the math underlying GPS navigation. It’s a foundational concept in virtually every formal computer science curriculum. I had never encountered it.

That moment reflected a broader pattern. Conversations about system design and tradeoffs often felt just out of reach. I could follow parts of them, but not enough to contribute meaningfully.

I was mostly self-taught. Wide coverage, shallow roots. The engineers around me had roots. You could feel it in how they reasoned through problems, how they talked about tradeoffs, how they debugged with patience instead of pure panic.

The Advice That Sounds Good Until You’re Living It

You’ve heard the phrase: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

It sounds aspirational. What nobody tells you is what it actually feels like to be in that room. It feels like barely following system design conversations. Like nodding along to discussions you can only partially decode. Like shipping solutions through trial and error and hoping nobody looks too closely.

Being the weakest engineer in the room is genuinely uncomfortable. It surfaces every gap. And if you’re not careful, it pushes you in exactly the wrong direction.

My instinct was to make myself smaller. On a team of five, every voice mattered. I stopped offering mine. I rushed toward working solutions without real understanding, hoping velocity would compensate for depth.

I was working harder and, at the same time, I was not improving.

The turning point came when one of the most senior engineers left. Before departing, he told me it was difficult to work with me because I lacked foundational programming knowledge, listing out the concepts he saw me struggle with.

For the first time, what had felt like vague inadequacy became something specific.

What the Cliché Misses

Proximity to stronger engineers is not sufficient on its own. You won’t absorb their skill through osmosis. The engineers who thrive when they’re outmatched are not the ones who wait for confidence to arrive. They treat the discomfort as diagnostic information.

What can they answer that I can’t? What do they see in a system that I’m missing?

I defined a clear picture of the engineer I wanted to become and compared it to where I was. I wrote down what I did not know. I identified how I would close each gap with books, tutorials and small projects. I asked for recommendations from the same engineer who gave me the hard feedback.

I figured out the gaps. Then the bridges. Then I worked through each of them.

Over time, conversations became clearer. Debugging became more systematic. I started contributing meaningfully rather than just executing tasks.

The Other Room Nobody Warns You About

There’s a less-obvious version of this same problem: when you’re the strongest engineer in the room.

It can feel rewarding. Less friction, more validation. But there’s also less growth. When you’re at the ceiling, there’s no external pressure to raise your own floor. The feedback loops that sharpen judgment go quiet. Some engineers spend years there without noticing. They’re good. They’re comfortable. They stop getting better.

Both rooms carry risk. One threatens your confidence. The other threatens your trajectory.

Being the weakest engineer in a strong room is an advantage, but only if you treat it like one. It gives you a clear benchmark. But the room doesn’t do the work for you. You have to name the gaps, build a plan, and follow through.

And if you ever find yourself in the other room, where you’re clearly the strongest, pay attention to how long you’ve been there.

Both rooms are trying to tell you something.

—Brian

Are U.S. Engineering Ph.D. Programs Losing Students?

Not every engineer has a doctorate, but Ph.D. engineers are an essential part of the workforce, researching and designing tomorrow’s high-tech products and systems. In the United States, early signs are emerging that Ph.D. programs in electrical engineering and related fields may be shrinking. Political and economic uncertainty mean some universities are now seeing smaller applicant pools and graduate cohorts.

Read more here.

What Happens When You Host an AI Cafe

Last November, three professors at Auburn University in Ala. hosted a gathering at a coffee shop to confront students’ concerns about AI. The event, which they call an “AI Café,” was meant to create an environment “where scholars engage their communities in genuine dialogue about AI. Not to lecture about technical capabilities, but to listen, learn, and co-create a vision for AI that serves the public interest.” In a guest article, they share what they learned at the event and tips for starting your own AI Café.

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What Is Inference Engineering?

Inference, the process of running a trained AI model on new data, is increasingly becoming a focus in the world of AI engineering. The growth of open LLMs means that more engineers can now tweak the models to perform better at inference. Given this trend, a recent issue of the Substack “The Pragmatic Engineer” does a deep dive on inference engineering—what it is, when it’s needed, and how to do it.

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“Negative” views of Broadcom driving thousands of VMware migrations, rival says

Amid customer dissatisfaction around Broadcom's VMware takeover, rivals have been trying to lure customers from the leading virtualization firm. One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers.

Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that “about 30,000 customers” have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom’s VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today.

“I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom,” Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.

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Remembering Gus Gaynor: A Devoted IEEE Volunteer

Gerard “Gus” Gaynor, a long-serving IEEE volunteer and former engineering director at 3M, died on 9 March. The IEEE Life Fellow was 104.

Readers of The Institute might remember Gus from his 2022 profile: “From Fixing Farm Equipment to Becoming a Director at 3M.” Just last year, he and I coauthored twoarticles. One discusses how to leverage relationships to boost your career growth. The other weighs the pros and cons of pursuing a technical or managerial career path. He was 103 years old then. How many IEEE members can claim a centenarian coauthor?

I first met Gus in 2009 at the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We sat together in the airplane on our way back to Minneapolis, our hometown. At home I told many of my friends about the remarkable person—who was 87 years young at the time—with whom I chatted during our six-hour flight.

A decade later, he and I met for lunch in Minneapolis. He drove himself to the restaurant, just asking for a hand to navigate the snowy sidewalk.

A dedicated IEEE volunteer

Gus’s involvement with IEEE predates the organization. He joined the Institute of Radio Engineers, a predecessor society, as a student member in 1942. Twenty years later he became an active IEEE volunteer.

He served on the TAB’s finance committee and the Publications Services and Products Board. He was president of the IEEE Engineering Management Society (now the Technology and Engineering Management Society ), and he was the Technology Management Council’s first president. He was the founding editor of IEEE-USA’s online magazine Today’s Engineer, which reported on government legislation and issues affecting U.S. members’ careers. The magazine is now available as the e-newsletter IEEE-USA InSight.

He authored several books on technology management, published by IEEE-USA.

IEEE Life Fellow Gerard “Gus” Gaynor died on 9 March.The Gaynor Family

Most recently, after the formation of TEMS in 2015, he became an active member of its executive committee. He served two terms as vice president of publications.

At 100 years old, he led the launch of a new publication, TEMS Leadership Briefs, a novel short-format open-access publication aimed at technology leaders.

Gus, who is a former member of The Institute’s editorial advisory board, also worked with Kathy Pretz, The Institute’s editor in chief, to start an ongoing series of TEMS-sponsored career-interest articles. He coauthored several of them.

Throughout his 64 years as an IEEE volunteer, he received several honors. They include IEEE EMS’s Engineering Manager of the Year Award, the IEEE TEMS Career Achievement Award, and the IEEE-USA McClure Citation of Honor. In 2014 he was inducted into the IEEE Technical Activities Board Hall of Honor.

A 25-year career at 3M

Gus received a degree in electrical engineering in 1950 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He worked for several companies including Automatic Electric (now part of Nokia) and Johnson Farebox (now part of Genfare), before joining 3M in 1962.

During his successful 25-year career at 3M, he served as chief engineer for a division in Italy, established the innovation department, and led the design and installation of the company’s first computerized manufacturing facilities. He retired as director of engineering in 1987.

Last year, IEEE Life Fellow Michael Condry, a former TEMS president, organized a Zoom call with Gus and other leaders of the society to celebrate Gus’s 104th birthday. Gus looked well and was his usual upbeat self, telling everyone: “I’m good. Everything’s well. I can’t complain.”

Gus was married to Shirley Margaret Karrels Gaynor, who passed away in 2018. He lives on in the hearts and minds of his seven children, seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and innumerable friends and IEEE colleagues.

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GoZTASP: A Zero-Trust Platform for Governing Autonomous Systems at Mission Scale

ZTASP is a mission-scale assurance and governance platform designed for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. It integrates heterogeneous systems—including drones, robots, sensors, and human operators—into a unified zero-trust architecture. Through Secure Runtime Assurance (SRTA) and Secure Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (SSTR), ZTASP continuously verifies system integrity, enforces safety constraints, and enables resilient operation even under degraded conditions.

ZTASP has progressed beyond conceptual design, with operational validation at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 in mission critical environments. Core components, including Saluki secure flight controllers, have reached TRL8 and are deployed in customer systems. While initially developed for high-consequence mission environments, the same assurance challenges are increasingly present across domains such as healthcare, transportation, and critical infrastructure.

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Chip Can Project Video the Size of a Grain of Sand

By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential in applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubits has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams.

That’s exactly the challenge scientists from MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Sandia National Laboratories, and the MITRE Corporation were trying to overcome when they developed an image projection technology that they realized could also be the fix for a host of other challenges in augmented reality, biomedical imaging, and elsewhere. It comes in the form of a less-than-0.1-square-millimeter photonic chip capable of projecting the Mona Lisa onto an area smaller than the size of two human egg cells.

“When we started, we certainly never would have anticipated that we would be making a technology that might revolutionize imaging,” says Matt Eichenfield, one of the leaders of the diamond-based quantum computer effort, called Quantum Moonshot, and a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Their chip is capable of projecting 68.6 million individual spots of light—called scannable pixels to differentiate them from physical pixels— per second per square millimeter, more than fifty times the capability of previous technology, such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) micromirror arrays.

“We have now made a scannable pixel that is at the absolute limit of what diffraction allows,” says Henry Wen, a visiting researcher at MIT and a photonics engineer at QuEra Computing.

The chip’s distinguishing feature is an array of tiny metallic cantilevers, which curve away from the plane of the chip in response to voltage and act as miniature “ski-jumps” for light. Light is channeled along the length of each cantilever via a waveguide, and exits at its tip. The cantilevers contain a thin layer of aluminum nitride, a piezoelectric which expands or contracts under voltage, thus moving the micromachine up and down and enabling the array to scan beams of light over a two-dimensional area.

Despite the magnitude of the team’s achievement, Eichenfield says that the process of engineering the cantilevers was “pretty smooth.” Each cantilever is composed of a stack of four thin layers of material and is curled approximately 90 degrees out of the plane at rest. To achieve such a high curvature, the team took advantage of differences in the contraction and expansion of individual layers when cooled. On top of its four layers of material, each cantilever also features a series of silicon dioxide bars running perpendicular to the waveguide, which keep the cantilever from curling along its width.

A micro-cantilever wiggles and waggles to project light in the right place.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

What was more of a challenge than engineering the chip itself was figuring out the details of actually making the chip project images and videos. Working out the process of synchronizing and timing the cantilevers’ light beams to generate the right colors at the right time was a substantial effort, according to Andy Greenspon, a researcher at MITRE who also worked on the project. Now, the team has successfully projected the movie A Charlie Brown Christmas through the chip.

The chip projected a roughly 125-micrometer image of the Mona Lisa.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers. The Quantum Moonshot program’s mission is to build a quantum computer that can be scaled to millions of qubits. So clearly, it needs a scalable way of controlling each one, explains Wen. Instead of using one laser per qubit, the team realized that not every qubit needed to be controlled at every given moment. The chip’s ability to move light beams over a two-dimensional area, would allow them to control all of the qubits with many fewer lasers.

Another process that Wen thinks the chip could improve is scanning objects for 3D printing. Today, that typically involves using a single laser to scan over the entire surface of an object. The new chip, however, could potentially employ thousands of laser beams. “I think now you can take a process that would have taken hours and maybe bring it down to minutes,” says Wen.

Wen is also excited to explore the potential of different cantilever shapes. By changing the orientations of the bars perpendicular to the waveguide, the team has been able to make the cantilevers curl into helixes. Wen says that such unusual shapes could be useful in making a lab-on-a-chip for cell biology or drug development. “A lot of this stuff is imaging, scanning a laser across something, either to image it or to stimulate some response. And so we could have one of these ski jumps curl not just up, but actually curl back around, and then move around and scan over a sample,” Wen explains. “If you can imagine a structure that will be useful for you, we should try it.”

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Iran-linked hackers disrupt operations at US critical infrastructure sites

Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are disrupting operations at multiple US critical infrastructure sites, likely in response to the country's ongoing war with the US, a half-dozen government agencies are warning.

In an advisory published Tuesday, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and US Cyber Command “urgently" warned that the APT, or advanced persistent threat group, is targeting PLCs, short for programmable logic controllers. These devices, typically the size of a toaster, sit in factories, water treatment centers, oil refineries, and other industrial settings, often in remote locations. They provide an interface between computers used for automation and physical machinery.

Operational disruption and financial loss

“Since at least March 2026, the authoring agencies identified (through engagements with victim organizations) an Iranian-affiliated APT-group that disrupted the function of PLCs,” the advisory stated. “These PLCs were deployed across multiple US critical infrastructure sectors (including Government Services and Facilities, Waste Water Systems (WWS), and Energy sectors) within a wide variety of industrial automation processes. Some of the victims experienced operational disruption and financial loss.”

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