Engineers at Caltech and the University of Southampton in England have collaboratively designed an electronics chip integrated with a photonics chip (which uses light to transfer data)—creating a cohesive final product capable of transmitting information at ultrahigh speed while generating minimal heat.
Though the two–chip sandwich is unlikely to find its way into your laptop, the new design could influence the future of data centers that manage very high volumes of data communication.
“Every time you are on a video call, stream a movie, or play an online video game, you’re routing data back and forth through a data center to be processed,” says Caltech graduate student Arian Hashemi Talkhooncheh, lead author of a paper describing the two-chip innovation that was published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits on November 3.
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