Electronics & Photonics

GRAND CHALLENGE:
New wireless and optical communication technologies for 100x more Efficient Interconnects

Electricity consumption for communication and entertainment devices is rapidly growing. At the Institute for Energy Efficiency, researchers are looking at ways to make these devices more efficient. Existing switches and routers use energy to switch every bit, but optical switches are capacitive and only dissipate energy when the connection is changed. This minimal energy to change connections is essentially the same when whether switching 1 Mbit/s or 10,000 Gbit/s. 

Projects

Fiber Optic Communications
The processor power problem has been the driver for our silicon photonics effort. The problem for higher capacity processors is IO. The power required to communicate is proportional to the line capacitance and to the frequency, and is typically half the power required to drive the chip. The longer the wire, the higher the capacity and more power is required to drive the line. In contrast, optical communication requires essentially the same power to transmit 1 micron or 1 kilometer. The capacitance is irrelevant. In addition, optical clock distribution will have a huge impact. This is because CMOS only requires energy when switching, so can be minimal much of the time, except for the clock distribution circuits, which are switching continually, and that gets worse as clock speeds increase. The Institute's effort in silicon photonics received a lot of attention a few years ago with its results in lasers on silicon for transmitters. Recently, the Institute supported an Intel breakthrough on the receiver side, with record results for Avalanche Photodiodes. Several hundred magazines and newspapers reported on this last December. The Institute reported 350 GHz gain bandwidth product, compared to commercial results of 100 GHz. The Electronics & Photonics group is now engaged with Hewlett Packard as well as Intel in exploring silicon photonics for high performance computing.
 

Affiliations

Silicon Photonics Center

Center for Energy Efficient Materials (CEEM)

Faculty

See listing of faculty in the Electronis & Photonics Solutions Group.