News Archives

$1.3 million grant to could help make Internet, networks faster

June 1, 2017 - By Kim Delker

Marek Osinski, a professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Physics and Astronomy, and Computer Science at The University of New Mexico, has been awarded a $1.3 million grant from the Office of Naval Research.

Osinski’s project will explore the use of semiconductor ring lasers to provide energy-efficient, high-speed data egress from cryogenic environments of superconducting electronics for further processing at room temperature.

The new project, aiming at fabrication and testing of prototype devices, is a continuation of an earlier grant award from ONR that supported numerical simulation began in August 2016 and is projected to continue through August 2018. The award is $200,000 a year for two years, or $400,000 total.

While the specific application of interest to ONR is cryogenic data egresss, this project will have a much broader range of applications.

“Ultra-high-speed, on-chip modulation of integrated lasers is an important ‘holy grail’ for the ever-increasing demand for ultrafast communication,” Osinski said.

He said this project is expected to have a revolutionary impact on the field of fundamental and applied physics of semiconductor lasers, bringing forth a new class of WRL-based integrated ultrafast sources. Development of inexpensive ultrafast chips operating at speeds exceeding 100 GHz will have a huge societal impact by increasing the transmission capacity of fiber-based networks, directly impacting G5 wireless networks, Internet, local area networks, metropolitan area networks, and long-haul backbones, thus bringing closer the concept of Networked Society.