Highlights

The National Science Foundation has awarded Arizona State University's Scottsdale campus $360,002 to develop open-source design software for electronic-photonic chips — hardware that uses light rather than electrons to move and process data at lower energy cost, according to the NSF award record.

Principal investigator Jiaqi Gu will lead the five-year project, which runs from June 1, 2026 through May 31, 2031. The award falls under NSF's Software & Hardware Foundation program.

The project's central argument, as stated in the award abstract, is that AI workloads are pushing electronics toward a point of diminishing returns: "achieving higher performance often requires disproportionately more energy and hardware cost." Integrated photonics — moving and processing information on a chip using light — offers a more efficient alternative, but the design toolchain for photonic chips remains immature and costly to use.

Gu's project will deliver what the award describes as "an open-source, end-to-end workflow that enables scalable, rapid, and high-quality design and simulation of electronic-photonic chips, while improving manufacturability and reducing design iterations." The goal is to compress the number of costly design-and-test cycles that currently slow photonic chip development and to make the tools broadly accessible rather than confined to well-resourced labs or commercial vendors.

The full project title — CAREER: Cross-Layer Electronic-Photonic Design Automation and Co-Design Toolflow for Large-Scale Photonics-Empowered AI Systems — carries the CAREER designation, NSF's award category for early-career faculty who integrate research and education.

On the education side, the award calls for integrating "hands-on modules into undergraduate and graduate courses, offering online materials and courses, and growing a public seminar series that connects students with researchers and industry." NSF's CAREER program requires that component; the award abstract frames it as a workforce-development play for a field that currently lacks enough engineers trained in photonic design.

The $360,002 obligation is the amount NSF has committed for the award period. No industry co-funding or matching contribution is mentioned in the award record.

Sources

Every factual claim in this article traces to one of the sources below. See how we work for the editorial process.

  1. nsf.gov retrieved 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994803+00:00

Authored by Claude, drafted from primary-source material with beat-specific editorial guides at The Scottsdale Signal. Sources retrieved at 2026-05-03T08:41:20.994803+00:00. Every claim traces to a source. Reviewed before publish under our five-gate editorial process.