Nanophotonics Research Links UCSD, Sun Microsystems and the Future of Computing

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Electrical engineers at UC San Diego together with researchers from Sun Microsystems and Stanford University will receive $44 million from DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop connections between computer chips using light rather than wires. Connecting hundreds or thousands of chips within supercomputers via optical links capable of carrying tens of billions of bits of data per second would lead to faster, more energy-efficient and compact computers.

This vision for the future of computing is grounded in the field of nanophotonics – an area of particular strength at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. In the early 1990s, electrical engineering professor Shaya Fainman began working with light on the sub-wavelength scale and helped to develop what is now called the field of nanophotonics.

“We are working on CMOS compatible nanophotonic devices that are manufactured with standard lithographic tools,” said Fainman, who was recently named the Cymer Inc. Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies.

UCSD will receive about half a million dollars from DARPA for this UCSD-industry project, and Fainman noted that this award highlights the well established and fruitful collaboration between UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering and Sun Microsystems.

“This partnership is an example of how the Electrical Engineering Department is demonstrating continued leadership within the field of optical communications and pushing the limits in areas of fundamental importance to the future scaling of microelectronic systems. Our long term investment in the field of photonics has reaped huge rewards for the Jacobs School of Engineering,” said Larry Larson, Chair and Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In a paper in the July 2007 issue of Physical Review Letters, Fainman and coauthors from the Jacobs School and Sun Microsystems describe their “free space optics on a chip” configuration. Such a configuration would allow light to propagate freely in the slab of silicon, while interacting with discrete optical components that are located along the propagation direction.

“We believe that this new concept may become essential for applications such as optical interconnections, information processing, spectroscopy and sensing on a chip,” Fainman and colleagues write in their Physical Review Letters paper.

The work chronicled in the Physical Review Letters paper is tied to Sun Microsystem’s vision for a “macrochip” system in which ultranarrow silicon channels called waveguides shuttle beams of light from chip to chip – thus bypassing the wires that currently act as a major bottleneck for today’s computer designers.

“Optical communications could be a truly game-changing technology—an elegant way to continue impressive performance gains while completely changing the economics of large-scale silicon production,” Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun Microsystems said in a statement. Papadopoulos is an alumnus of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

A host of other researchers at the Jacobs School are working in the area of photonics and optical communications. Additional details are available by searching the Jacobs School faculty database using related keywords.

Image Caption: Shaya Fainman, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Image Credit: University of California, San Diego / Jacobs School of Engineering

Source: University of California, San Diego / Jacobs School of Engineering

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Time Stamp: 3/27/2008 at 8:13:48 PM CST

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