Electronics & Photonics Solutions Group: 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.