Stanford electrical engineer Jelena Vuckovic wants to make computers faster and more efficient by reinventing how they send data back and forth between chips, where the work is done.
In computers today, data is pushed through wires as a stream of electrons. That takes a lot of power, which helps explain why laptops get so warm.
"Several years ago, my colleague David Miller carefully analyzed power consumption in computers, and the results were striking," said Vuckovic, referring to electrical engineering Professor David Miller. "Up to 80 percent of the microprocessor power is consumed by sending data over the wires - so called interconnects."
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Ref: Inverse design and demonstration of a compact and broadband on-chip wavelength demultiplexer.
Nature Photonics (2015) | DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2015.69
Breakthrough using light to transfer data could easily carry 20x more data and can be mass produced
