Given the breadth of technical and application areas that have been significantly touched by optics, experts with different backgrounds were invited to give a snapshot of the field from their individual vantage points.

The fields of optics and photonics have experienced dramatic technical advances over the past several decades and have cemented themselves as key enabling technologies across many different industries. This paper explores past milestones, present state of the art, and future perspectives of several different topics, including: lasers, materials, devices, communications, bioimaging, displays, manufacturing, and industry evolution.

Monolithic integration of photonic devices such as lasers, modulators, and photodetectors, along with their associated electronic circuitry, has recently made significant advances such that high performance is now being achieved in devices using both the GaAs and InP materials systems. The advances in these optoelectronic integrated circuits, or OEICs, are being driven by the needs of second-generation photonic systems including optical interconnects, optical computing and signal processing, and communications. Furthermore, the pace of the technology is being set by the improvements made in semiconductor materials growth using such methods as molecular beam and vapor phase epitaxies. In this paper we discuss the needs of several generic photonic systems for advanced optoelectronic chips. These needs are now being met by the fabrication of high-performance and highly functional integrated transmitters, receivers, modulators, and arrays of such devices. We discuss examples of these and other archetype integrated circuits which serve to illustrate the advances in, and challenges to this new device technology. Finally, a brief description is given of the materials growth techniques which are used in OEIC structures.