Power, Performance, and Possibility
Webinar Recordings:
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As data centers push the limits of performance and efficiency, the semiconductor industry stands at a pivotal moment. Traditional scaling approaches can no longer meet the massive compute and energy demands of emerging technologies like AI, 6G, and advanced sensing. New breakthroughs in chip packaging, photonic integration, and terahertz-frequency silicon circuits for ultra‑high‑speed sensing, communications, and spectroscopy are redefining how data and information move within and between processors and the physical world—ushering in a new era of performance, bandwidth, and energy optimization.
This Leading Edge webinar will explore the innovations shaping next-generation semiconductor systems and the manufacturing ecosystems enabling them, where performance scaling, power efficiency, and design innovation converge to power the next decades of technological progress.
Registration Fee: ILP Member: Complimentary General Public: $250 now $100 (60% off) Current MIT Faculty/Staff/Student: Complimentary
Hong Fan is a Program Director at the Office of Corporate Relations at MIT. She joined OCR in August 2016, brought with her 20+ years of international work experience across semiconductor, consumer electronics, telecom, and higher education.
Prior to joining OCR, Hong spent 12 years in the semiconductor industry with executive functions in strategic marketing, business development, corporate strategy, product management, and product marketing at Analog Devices and MediaTek. During those years, Hong played instrumental roles in identifying emerging business opportunities related to wireless communication networks, smartphones, wearable devices, Internet of Things (IoT), and medical devices and applications. She led cross-functional teams in defining and driving product and market strategy for businesses with annual revenue ranging from $30 million to $100 million.
Prior to joining the semiconductor industry, Hong spent 6 years in the telecommunications and electronics industry, leading engineering teams at companies such as Lucent Technologies and Watkins-Johnson Company for the development of digital signal processing, wireless communications, and micro-controller software.
Before coming to US, Hong was a strategic research staff at the President Office of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of the oldest universities in China. She was the first woman to hold this highly selective position.
Hong has a B.S in Electronic Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland at College Park, and an MBA from Sloan School of Management at MIT. She received numerous academic honors and awards including the McKinsey & Co. Scholarship, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Shanghai Outstanding College Graduate Award.
Principal Research Scientist MIT Microphotonics Center/ Materials Processing Center
Dr. Anu Agarwal received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 1994, where she investigated the spatial extent of point defect interactions in silicon. She has been at MIT’s Microphotonics Center since 1994, except for a short (2001-2004) stint at Clarendon Photonics, where she was a part of a team of engineers developing a novel optical filter. Currently, as a Principal Research Scientist, she is developing integrated Si-CMOS compatible linear and non-linear materials for photonic devices, especially in the mid-IR regime, for hyperspectral imaging and chem-bio sensing, because most chemical and biological toxins have their fingerprints in this range. She has over 100 journal and refereed conference publications, 6 awarded patents and 5 pending patents. Her work on MIR materials and devices is creating a planar, integrated, Si-CMOS-compatible microphotonics platform which will enable on-chip imaging and sensing applications.
Director, MIT Center for Integrated Circuits and Systems (CICS) Professor, MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS)
Ruonan Han is the Director of the MIT Center for Integrated Circuits and Systems (CICS) and a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his B.S. degree in microelectronics from Fudan University, China, in 2007, M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 2009, and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University in 2014. He joined MIT in July 2014 and has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Assistant Professor 2014~2018, Associate Professor 2018~2025, Professor 2025~). His research group aims to explore microelectronic circuits and systems to bridge the terahertz gap between microwave and infrared domains. He has served on the committees of a few conferences, including the technical-program committee (TPC) of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) (2022~present), the IEEE Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium (2017~present), and the 2019 International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Steering Committee. He was the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering (2020~present) and IEEE Transactions on Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (2018~2021), and the Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (T-MTT) (2019). He is the 2020~2022 Distinguished Microwave Lecturer of IEEE Microwave Theory Techniques Society (MTT-S) and 2025~2026 Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). Ruonan was the recipient of three Best Student Paper Awards from IEEE RFIC Symposia (2012, 2017, and 2021), NSF Faculty Early CAREER Development Award (2017), Intel Outstanding Researcher Award (2019), and the IEEE Solid-State Circuit Society New Frontier Award (2023).