MIT researchers advance toward greater bandwidth, more energy-efficient communications
An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances sinc...
These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.
“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC , at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.
An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.
The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.
“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.