Fully Laser Integrated Photonics (FLIP) may replace conventional electronics in a whole lot of computing and cut down computing's ever-rising demand for power (Google today already accounts for 1% of US power consumption) by an order of magnitude.
It is as fast as lightning, it is cool, it is going to change the world as fundamentally as did manned flight and it has been created by an Indian, Raj Dutt... Okay, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the US Navy chipped in.
FLIP has been enabled by a breakthrough in the science of materials just announced in the US: Indian American scientist and entrepreneur Dr Birendra (Raj) Dutt along with a top team of researchers at his own company APIC Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University has discovered how to make germanium produce a laser when charged with electricity. This would eventually allow a new breed of microchips to be built on a commercial scale in which pulses of light, called photons, zip at top speed along nano-sized waveguides of the self-same germanium etched into silicon, instead of electrons whizzing around in copper circuits on silicon as in today's chips.
When electrons move through a conductor, they produce heat, which then has to be removed using additional energy. Photons, on the other hand, do not produce heat as they move through their waveguides at the speed of light, hence no energy is required to cool photonic chips. Further, use of doped germanium together with the straining of this material when grown on silicon produces a laser that makes mass commercial production of photonic chips possible.
Germanium belongs to the same group of elements as silicon, making full integration of laser chips possible. While use of photons in chips is not new, till the present discovery of making germanium 'lase', it had not been possible to have integrated photon chips. Dr Dutt, an IIT-Kharagpur, aeronautical engineering alumnus of the class of 1971, founded APIC Corporation in 1999 for research, development and production of highly integrated photonic and electronic technology. Today his company has forged strategic relationships with a large number of universities and institutions in the US. It has a wholly-owned fabrication facility in Honolulu. The breakthrough research, which was achieved under a US government contract, was sponsored by the Naval Air Systems Command, Aircraft Division,(NAVAIR) and the National Security Agency (NSA) and funded by the US department of defence.
Dr Dutt, founder and chief technology officer of APIC and the principal investigator on this project, along with his co-investigator, Dr Jurgen Michel, senior research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, succeeded in getting germanium, which is a group IV material that is silicon CMOS compatible, to lase when electrically pumped."Both the scientific community and industry have been waiting for a breakthrough like this. The new photonic chips will have exponentially better performance at a tiny fraction of current power usage, and a tremendous positive impact on the environment through drastic reduction of heat generated by computing devices," Dr Dutt told ET from his office in Culver City, California.
Experts in the US are upbeat about APIC's research. Dr. Tony Tether, former director of Defence Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), the US agency responsible for development of new technology for use by the military has stated that, "The APIC FLIP effort has achieved creating a germanium LASER heretofore thought to be impossible. Take these results as the Kitty Hawk demonstration where it was shown that manned flight was possible."
APIC now plans to commercially roll-out the fully manufacturable prototype of the photonic chip over the next 18-24 months and has teamed up with R&D fabrication facility at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany in New York state. "The performance increase comes with a stunning decrease in the amount of power needed as compared to today's chips. Voracious demand for online and mobile services, along with cloud computing, has caused explosive growth in the amount of data centres and the energy they gobble up. But photons simply require much less power than electrons to propel, and most importantly they do not generate heat. Using photonic processors and components would enable massive energy savings for data centres, which would consume only about 10% of today," Dr Dutt added.
Once the chip has been commercially launched, APIC Corporation could look at tie-ups with other chip makers for production. The company, which is a US government contractor, owns the patent for the photon chip technology and Dr Dutt believes that there could be opportunities in the future to look at tie-ups with institutions in India for making the photon-chip.
It is as fast as lightning, it is cool, it is going to change the world as fundamentally as did manned flight and it has been created by an Indian, Raj Dutt... Okay, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the US Navy chipped in.
FLIP has been enabled by a breakthrough in the science of materials just announced in the US: Indian American scientist and entrepreneur Dr Birendra (Raj) Dutt along with a top team of researchers at his own company APIC Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University has discovered how to make germanium produce a laser when charged with electricity. This would eventually allow a new breed of microchips to be built on a commercial scale in which pulses of light, called photons, zip at top speed along nano-sized waveguides of the self-same germanium etched into silicon, instead of electrons whizzing around in copper circuits on silicon as in today's chips.
When electrons move through a conductor, they produce heat, which then has to be removed using additional energy. Photons, on the other hand, do not produce heat as they move through their waveguides at the speed of light, hence no energy is required to cool photonic chips. Further, use of doped germanium together with the straining of this material when grown on silicon produces a laser that makes mass commercial production of photonic chips possible.
Germanium belongs to the same group of elements as silicon, making full integration of laser chips possible. While use of photons in chips is not new, till the present discovery of making germanium 'lase', it had not been possible to have integrated photon chips. Dr Dutt, an IIT-Kharagpur, aeronautical engineering alumnus of the class of 1971, founded APIC Corporation in 1999 for research, development and production of highly integrated photonic and electronic technology. Today his company has forged strategic relationships with a large number of universities and institutions in the US. It has a wholly-owned fabrication facility in Honolulu. The breakthrough research, which was achieved under a US government contract, was sponsored by the Naval Air Systems Command, Aircraft Division,(NAVAIR) and the National Security Agency (NSA) and funded by the US department of defence.
Dr Dutt, founder and chief technology officer of APIC and the principal investigator on this project, along with his co-investigator, Dr Jurgen Michel, senior research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, succeeded in getting germanium, which is a group IV material that is silicon CMOS compatible, to lase when electrically pumped."Both the scientific community and industry have been waiting for a breakthrough like this. The new photonic chips will have exponentially better performance at a tiny fraction of current power usage, and a tremendous positive impact on the environment through drastic reduction of heat generated by computing devices," Dr Dutt told ET from his office in Culver City, California.
Experts in the US are upbeat about APIC's research. Dr. Tony Tether, former director of Defence Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), the US agency responsible for development of new technology for use by the military has stated that, "The APIC FLIP effort has achieved creating a germanium LASER heretofore thought to be impossible. Take these results as the Kitty Hawk demonstration where it was shown that manned flight was possible."
APIC now plans to commercially roll-out the fully manufacturable prototype of the photonic chip over the next 18-24 months and has teamed up with R&D fabrication facility at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany in New York state. "The performance increase comes with a stunning decrease in the amount of power needed as compared to today's chips. Voracious demand for online and mobile services, along with cloud computing, has caused explosive growth in the amount of data centres and the energy they gobble up. But photons simply require much less power than electrons to propel, and most importantly they do not generate heat. Using photonic processors and components would enable massive energy savings for data centres, which would consume only about 10% of today," Dr Dutt added.
Once the chip has been commercially launched, APIC Corporation could look at tie-ups with other chip makers for production. The company, which is a US government contractor, owns the patent for the photon chip technology and Dr Dutt believes that there could be opportunities in the future to look at tie-ups with institutions in India for making the photon-chip.
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