At CLEO: 2014, special symposia included one on "Enabling Photonics Technologies for Miniaturization." Speakers presented the latest photonics-based designs, devices and processes that enable the integration of miniaturized technology into applications like smartphones, solar devices and point-of-care medical devices.

In the silicon photonics symposium, presenters from academia and industry showed their most recent efforts in large-scale silicon photonic integration. Jifeng Liu (Dartmouth) noted that optical interconnects do not have bandwidth limits or resistive losses like electrical interconnects do, so they provide an ideal solution to high-bandwidth, ultralow-energy data links.