Michal Lipson (born 1970) is an American physicist known for her work onsilicon photonics. A member of theNational Academy of Sciences since 2019 and theNational Academy of Engineering since 2025, Lipson was named a 2010MacArthur Fellow for contributions to silicon photonics especially towards enabling GHz silicon active devices.[1] Until 2014, she was the Given Foundation Professor of Engineering atCornell University in the school of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Cornell.[2] She is now the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering atColumbia University.[3] In 2009 she co-founded the company PicoLuz, which develops and commercializes silicon nanophotonics technologies.[4][5] In 2019, she co-founded Voyant Photonics, which develops next generation lidar technology based on silicon photonics.[6] In 2022, Lipson was a co-founder of Xscape photonics to accelerateAI,ML, and simulation hardware. In 2020 Lipson was elected the 2021 vice president ofOptica (formerly the Optical Society), and she served as the Optica president in 2023.[7]
After spending two years as an undergraduate student at the Instituto de Física at theUniversity of São Paulo, Lipson continued at theTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she earned aBSc in physics in 1992, followed by anMSc in 1994 and aPhD in 1998, both also in physics.[8] Her doctoral research focused on "Coupled Exciton-Photon Modes in Semiconductor Optical Microcavities". Lipson then spent 2 years as a postdoctoral associate withLionel Kimerling atMIT, and then accepted a position atCornell University in 2001.
Lipson is best known for her work on silicon photonics. She developed (along with other researchers around the world at IBM, Intel, Ghent University) silicon photonic components such as waveguide couplers, ring resonators, modulators, detectors, WDM wavelength sources and sensors on silicon platform. She published the first paper on a class of versatile waveguides known asSlot-waveguides in 2004,[9] which has since been cited over one thousand times. In all her work has been cited 32,373 times (as of January 18, 2018).[10][better source needed] She was also the first to demonstrateoptical parametric gain in silicon,[11] which was considered an important step towards building optical amplifiers in silicon.
Lipson's McArthur fellowship[1] citation mentions her work in ring modulators (circular waveguides) as the key contribution of Lipson via the continued refinement of both opto-electronic and purely optical circuits for smaller size,[12] increased efficiency, and accelerated switching speed[13] The resulting silicon-based photonic integrated circuits have the potential to improve signal transmission and processing dramatically.
J. S. Levy, A. Gondarenko, M. A. Foster,A. C. Turner-Foster,A. L. Gaeta, M. Lipson, "CMOS-compatible multiple-wavelength oscillator for on-chip optical interconnects."Nature Photonics4, 37–40 (2010).[27]
B. Stern, X. Ji, Y. Okawachi, A. L. Gaeta, M. Lipson, "Battery-operated integrated frequency comb generator".Nature.562, 401 (2018).[28]
A. Dutt, C. Joshi, X. Ji, J. Cardenas, Y. Okawachi, K. Luke, A. L. Gaeta, M. Lipson, "On-chip dual-comb source for spectroscopy".Science Advances4, e1701858 (2018).[29]
Ultralow-loss silicon and silicon nitride
J. Cardenas, C. B. Poitras, J. T. Robinson, K. Preston, L. Chen, M. Lipson, "Low loss etchless silicon photonic waveguides".Optics Express.17, 4752–4757 (2009).[30]
K. Luke, A. Dutt, C. B. Poitras, M. Lipson, "Overcoming Si3N4 film stress limitations for high quality factor ring resonators".Optics Express.21, 22829–22833 (2013).[31]
A. Griffith, J. Cardenas, C. B. Poitras, M. Lipson, "High quality factor and high confinement silicon resonators using etchless process".Optics Express,20, 21341–21345 (2012).[32]
X. Ji, F. A. S. Barbosa, S. P. Roberts, A. Dutt, J. Cardenas, Y. Okawachi, A. Bryant, A. L. Gaeta, M. Lipson, "Ultra-low-loss on-chip resonators with sub-milliwatt parametric oscillation threshold".Optica,4, 619–624 (2017).[33]
Manipatruni S, Lipson, M. and Young, I.A., 2013. Device scaling considerations for nanophotonic CMOS global interconnects.IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics,19(2), pp. 8200109-8200109.
