This blog takes a look at some of the newest technologies coming out of the lab that might eventually make a difference in broadband.
Terahertz Chips. One of the biggest hurdles to faster computing is the speed at which we can get data into and out of a chip. Scientists at Notre Dame, the Universite de Lille in France, and Nanyang Technology University in Singapore have collaborated to design a chip that uses multiple terahertz waves to vastly increase the I/O function in computers. Their findings were reported in Nature.
Terahertz waves are located between optical light and microwaves, ranging in frequencies between 0.1 and 10 terahertz. The challenge with using terahertz waves in electronics is finding a way to beam a signal to where it’s needed rather than broadcasting widely. The team is using topological photonics and a beamformer that can focus the beam in any direction within a chip. The remaining challenge is to find efficient power amplifiers and electronic oscillators that will work at terahertz speeds. The chips would be a huge breakthrough that could enable super-highspeed applications like real-life 3D holograms or self-driving cars capable of processing the huge amounts of information from multiple sensors.
New Material for Better Chips. Scientists at the EPFL’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab) in Lausanne, Switzerland, found an interesting property of vanadium dioxide – it naturally changes from an insulator to a conductor at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Further, after the material is cooled to become an insulator it remembers what happened to it while it was a conductor. This makes it a great material for building chips because the use of a circuit through the material naturally heats it to the needed temperature to become a conductor. But turn off the power, even temporarily, and when the material cools it remembers the circuit path and data that was stored during use. These properties hold huge promise for using vanadium dioxide for long-term data storage. The switch between the two states also mimics the way that brain neurons operate, in that a circuit could be triggered only when needed, making this an interesting material for making advanced chips that mimic brain functioning.
Cooling Data Centers. Julia Carpenter, the cofounder of the new company Apheros stumbled across a metal foam during research for her Ph.D. It runs out the foam is as much as 1,000X better as a heat sink than standard metal used in cooling plates used to cool down electronic components, like used in data centers. The term metal foam comes from looking at the material under a microscope that shows a sponge-like appearance. The foam can be inserted into existing cooling places and increase cooling capacity by 90%. The real promise of the metal foam is to use it in the primary design as a cooling element. Data centers create a huge amount of heat, and getting rid of that heat is one of the challenges of building a new data center.
End to Exploding Batteries. Researchers at Cornell have made a breakthrough that could end the problem of exploding lithium-ion batteries. The solution is to replace the normal liquid based lithium with porous lithium crystals. The crystal structure has been tried before, but solid crystals encouraged the growth of dendrites, or crystal growth, that eventually slowed the flow of ions. The porous crystals are structured around a molecular cage, with and three macrocycles, that allow ions to pass.