Department of Energy announces $98M for 40 transformative energy technology projects
The U.S. Department of Energy announced $98 million in funding for 40 new projects as part of OPEN 2018, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA‑E) latest open funding opportunity. These funds will support some of America’s top energy innovators’ R&D projects as they seek to develop technologies to transform the nation’s energy system.
“ARPA-E’s open solicitations serve a valuable purpose. They give America’s energy innovators the opportunity to tell us about the next big thing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “Many of the greatest advances in human history started from the bottom up with a single person or idea, and OPEN 2018 provides a chance to open our doors to potentially the next great advancement in energy.”
UCSB Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Daniel Blumenthal and IEE industry partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise were among those selected. Yale University; Northern Arizona University; University of Colorado, Boulder; Stanford University; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; Morton Photonics; Microsoft; and Barefoot Networks are collaborating on the project. "The funding is significant in that it establishes our leadership in the next generation of optical fiber research and energy efficient data centers,” said Blumenthal. “It also ushers a broad team of academic and industry researchers and resources into a new era of communications that will bring the performance of systems normally found in large scientific instruments, like atomic clocks, onto the chip scale.”
University of California-Santa Barbara – Santa Barbara, CA
FRESCO: Frequency Stabilized Coherent Optical Low-energy Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) DC Interconnects – $3,750,000
The University of California-Santa Barbara will develop a low power, low-cost solution to overcome power and bandwidth scaling limitations presented by the emergence of hyperscale data centers and related exponential growth in global data traffic. The FRESCO transceiver leverages recent advances in fundamental laser physics to enable terabit, coherent optical (light-based) data transmission inside data centers using an ultra-pure and ultra-stable laser signal. The outcome of the project will be an integrated photonic package capable of connecting to 100 terabit-per-second networking switches over coherent optical short-reach data center fiber links. This effort could disrupt the way data centers, data center interconnects, and terabit Ethernet switches are built, drastically reducing their global energy consumption.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise – Palo Alto, CA
Ultra-Energy-Efficient Integrated DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) Optical Interconnect – $3,506,711
Hewlett Packard Labs will develop a low-energy consumption, ultra-efficient, high-speed technology for transmitting data as light in high-performance computing systems and data centers. The team will combine recent breakthroughs in low-cost laser manufacturing technology and ultra-efficient photonic tuning technology with their established in-house technology platform. It will demonstrate a fully integrated optical transceiver capable of sending data faster than 1,000 gigabytes per second over 40 simultaneous channels, even in rigorous practical operating conditions with widely varying temperatures.
The 40 projects announced today are just the beginning, as OPEN applications have seeded other small new program areas that ARPA-E will roll out over the coming weeks.
To view the complete list of selected OPEN 2018 projects, click HERE.