Lifeboat Foundation

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Engineers from HyperLight, a leader in the commercialization of thin-film lithium niobate (LN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs), have achieved breakthrough voltage-bandwidth performances in integrated electro-optic modulators. The broadband electro-optic PIC could lead to orders of magnitude energy consumption reduction for next generation optical networking.

“We believe the significantly improved electro-optic modulation performance in our integrated LN platform will lead to a paradigm shift for both analog and digital ultra-high speed RF links” Tweet this

Energy consumption in optical networking for ethernet, data centers and 5G is soaring as a result of the rapidly growing data traffic. This is because of the limited performance of existing electro-optic modulators, the key element in converting data from the electrical to optical domain at high speed for optical networks. Current electro-optic modulators require extremely high radio-frequency (RF) driving voltages (5 V) as the analog bandwidth in ethernet ports approaches 100 GHz for future terabits per sec capacity transceivers. In comparison, a typical CMOS RF modulator driver delivers less than 0.5 V at such frequencies. Compound semiconductor modulator drivers can deliver voltage 1 V at significantly increased cost and energy consumption but still fall short to meet the optimum driving voltage. The limited voltage-bandwidth performance in electro-optic modulators poses a serious challenge for meeting tight power consumption requirements from network builders.

The 2000-year-old mechanism has baffled experts since it was discovered on a shipwreck in 1901.

Transistors, devices that can amplify, conduct or switch electronic signals or electric current, are key components of many electronics on the market today. These devices can be fabricated using a variety of inorganic and organic semiconducting materials.

Metals are generally considered unsuitable for fabricating transistors, as they screen electric fields and thus make it difficult to realize devices with tunable electrical conductivity. A possible way to create electronic components based on metals is to use gradients of counterions in films of metal nanoparticles functionalized with charged organic ligands.

In the past, engineers have successfully used this strategy to create a variety of devices, ranging from resistors to diodes and sensors. Nonetheless, modulating the electrical conductivity of these devices has often proved to be very challenging.

The State of the Edge report is based on analysis of the potential growth of edge infrastructure from the bottom up across multiple sectors modeled by Tolaga Research. The forecast evaluates 43 use cases spanning 11 vertical industries.

The one thing these use cases have in common is a growing need to process and analyze data at the point where it is being created and consumed. Historically, IT organizations have deployed applications that process data in batch mode overnight. As organizations embrace digital business transformation initiatives, it’s becoming more apparent that data needs to be processed and analyzed at the edge in near real time.

Of course, there are multiple classes of edge computing platforms, ranging from smartphones and internet of things (IoT) gateways to complete hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms that are being employed to process data at scale at the edge of a telecommunications network.

Fully Homomorphic Encryption is considered the “holy grail” of encryption. But right now it takes too much compute power to be used widely.

Honeywell’s H1 quantum system has reached a record-high quantum volume.

Researchers have developed a new data transfer system that is 20 times faster than USB 3.0.

This combines high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin as a strand of hair. The system could boost energy efficiency in data centres and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft. Researchers presented their breakthrough at the recent IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, held virtually.

“There’s an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips – cloud computing, the Internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire,” says Jack Holloway, who led the research. Holloway completed his PhD in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science last year and currently works for Raytheon.

But Aspelmeyer and his colleagues could not declare victory quite yet: they still had to rule out the possibility that the source mass modulation was generating other forces on the test mass that would oscillate at precisely the same frequency. Periodic rocking of the table supporting the experimental apparatus, caused by recoil from the barely visible motion of the source mass, was just one of a host of confounders the researchers had to carefully quantify. In the end, they found that all known nongravitational forces would be at least 10 times smaller than the gravitational interaction.

Reaching toward Quantum Scales

Aspelmeyer believes that an improved torsion pendulum will be sensitive to gravity from masses 5000 times smaller still—lighter than a single eyelash. His ultimate goal is to experimentally test the quantum nature of gravity, a question that has perplexed physicists for nearly a century. Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful and precisely tested theories in all of science: it describes everything from the behavior of subatomic particles to the semiconductor physics that makes modern computing possible. But attempts to develop a quantum theory of gravity have repeatedly been stymied by contradictory and nonsensical predictions.

MIT scientists demonstrate a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data 10 times as fast as USB.

How fast does data flow? The answer: not fast enough.

The search for more efficient data-transfer solutions to meet the ever-increasing demand for computation never ends. Even today, most data transmission happens via traditional copper cables, which are power-hungry, leading to a compromise between data exchange and energy consumed. Fiber-optic cables are an alternative, but they don’t work well with the silicon chips in our computing systems. Overcoming these limitations, while theoretically possible, can turn out to be prohibitively expensive, especially for electronics-rich applications like data centers, spacecraft, electric vehicles and so on.

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