Scientists from the Centre for Nano Science and
Engineering (CeNSE) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in
Bengaluru are working on two projects in the area of photonic integrated
circuits.
In the first, researchers and scientists
at CeNSE are building a next-generation processor. It’s hard to imagine a
world without microprocessors. These ubiquitous little chips drive our
technology and are embedded everywhere, from phones to laptops to DVDs
and rockets. But at its very core, each unit is still electrical; it has
millions of transistors connected with copper lines.
What
if you replaced the copper lines with photonic components? It would
exponentially improve the power of microprocessors. Now, scientists from
CeNSE, in a project supported by the Defence of Research and
Development Organisation (DRDO), are trying to develop indigenous
technology for high-speed optical interconnect technology. CeNSe has
received a Rs. 5-crore grant from the DRDO for the three-year project.
“The
copper wires/interconnect create a bottleneck for data transfer, but
the project, will exploit high-speed Silicon photonics to improve data
transfer between the core and the memory exponentially,” said Professor
Shankar Kumar Selvaraja from CeNSe. In the second project, a CeNSE team
is working towards improving the existing optical communication
technology. “The aim is to build integrated photonic transceivers that
will allow for communication speeds beyond 1 terabits per second per
channel in a scalable fashion,” said Professor V. R. Supradeepa, one of
the principal investigators of this Rs. 3.40 crore project.
Source:- The Hindu, 21-Jan-2016
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