Posts tagged space
CU research: Microchips using light instead of wires boosts speed exponentially
Sep 30th
could allow for faster and faster electronics
A pair of breakthroughs in the field of silicon photonics by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Micron Technology Inc. could allow for the trajectory of exponential improvement in microprocessors that began nearly half a century ago—known as Moore’s Law—to continue well into the future, allowing for increasingly faster electronics, from supercomputers to laptops to smartphones.
The research team, led by CU-Boulder researcher Milos Popovic, an assistant professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering, developed a new technique that allows microprocessors to use light, instead of electrical wires, to communicate with transistors on a single chip, a system that could lead to extremely energy-efficient computing and a continued skyrocketing of computing speed into the future.
Popovic and his colleagues created two different optical modulators—structures that detect electrical signals and translate them into optical waves—that can be fabricated within the same processes already used in industry to create today’s state-of-the-art electronic microprocessors. The modulators are described in a recent issue of the journal Optics Letters.
First laid out in 1965, Moore’s Law predicted that the size of the transistors used in microprocessors could be shrunk by half about every two years for the same production cost, allowing twice as many transistors to be placed on the same-sized silicon chip. The net effect would be a doubling of computing speed every couple of years.
The projection has held true until relatively recently. While transistors continue to get smaller, halving their size today no longer leads to a doubling of computing speed. That’s because the limiting factor in microelectronics is now the power that’s needed to keep the microprocessors running. The vast amount of electricity required to flip on and off tiny, densely packed transistors causes excessive heat buildup.
“The transistors will keep shrinking and they’ll be able to continue giving you more and more computing performance,” Popovic said. “But in order to be able to actually take advantage of that you need to enable energy-efficient communication links.”
Microelectronics also are limited by the fact that placing electrical wires that carry data too closely together can result in “cross talk” between the wires.
In the last half-dozen years, microprocessor manufacturers, such as Intel, have been able to continue increasing computing speed by packing more than one microprocessor into a single chip to create multiple “cores.” But that technique is limited by the amount of communication that then becomes necessary between the microprocessors, which also requires hefty electricity consumption.
Using light waves instead of electrical wires for microprocessor communication functions could eliminate the limitations now faced by conventional microprocessors and extend Moore’s Law into the future, Popovic said.
Optical communication circuits, known as photonics, have two main advantages over communication that relies on conventional wires: Using light has the potential to be brutally energy efficient, and a single fiber-optic strand can carry a thousand different wavelengths of light at the same time, allowing for multiple communications to be carried simultaneously in a small space and eliminating cross talk.
Optical communication is already the foundation of the Internet and the majority of phone lines. But to make optical communication an economically viable option for microprocessors, the photonics technology has to be fabricated in the same foundries that are being used to create the microprocessors. Photonics have to be integrated side-by-side with the electronics in order to get buy-in from the microprocessor industry, Popovic said.
“In order to convince the semiconductor industry to incorporate photonics into microelectronics you need to make it so that the billions of dollars of existing infrastructure does not need to be wiped out and redone,” Popovic said.
Last year, Popovic collaborated with scientists at MIT to show, for the first time, that such integration is possible. “We are building photonics inside the exact same process that they build microelectronics in,” Popovic said. “We use this fabrication process and instead of making just electrical circuits, we make photonics next to the electrical circuits so they can talk to each other.”
In two papers published last month in Optics Letters with CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Jeffrey Shainline as lead author, the research team refined their original photonic-electronic chip further, detailing how the crucial optical modulator, which encodes data on streams of light, could be improved to become more energy efficient. That optical modulator is compatible with a manufacturing process—known as Silicon-on-Insulator Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor, or SOI CMOS—used to create state-of-the-art multicore microprocessors such as the IBM Power7 and Cell, which is used in the Sony PlayStation 3.
The researchers also detailed a second type of optical modulator that could be used in a different chip-manufacturing process, called bulk CMOS, which is used to make memory chips and the majority of the world’s high-end microprocessors.
Vladimir Stojanovic, who leads one of the MIT teams collaborating on the project and who is the lead principal investigator for the overall research program, said the group’s work on optical modulators is a significant step forward.
“On top of the energy-efficiency and bandwidth-density advantages of silicon-photonics over electrical wires, photonics integrated into CMOS processes with no process changes provides enormous cost-benefits and advantage over traditional photonic systems,” Stojanovic said.
The CU-led effort is a part of a larger project on building a complete photonic processor-memory system, which includes research teams from MIT led by Stojanovic, Rajeev Ram and Michael Watts, a team from Micron Technology led by Roy Meade and a team from the University of California, Berkeley, led by Krste Asanovic. The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.
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Input sought on electric-assisted bikes on multi-use paths
Aug 29th
The public is invited to attend a public meeting from 5 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 4, to learn more about options being considered for a proposed electric-assisted bicycle (e-bikes) pilot project. The meeting will be held at the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder building located at 1750 33rd St., in the Houston Room on the first floor. For those interested, e-bike users and retailers will offer the opportunity to test ride e-bikes and learn more about the technology from 4 to 5 p.m. prior the meeting.
This effort is part of the ‘Complete Streets’ focus area of the current process to update to the city’s Transportation Master Plan (TMP).
This meeting is a follow-up to an initial e-bikes public meeting held in early August. That meeting introduced the potential pilot project to the community and initiated discussions about e-bike use on multi-use paths. At the Sept. 4 meeting, transportation staff will present options under consideration for amending the definition of an e-bike and for testing e-bike use on multi-use paths. If residents are not able to attend the public meeting, the city is also collecting feedback on e-bikes with a survey available here: www.surveymonkey.com/s/E-bikesurvey. City staff will also be performing in-person surveys on multi-use paths around Boulder.
Currently, e-bikes are only allowed in on roadways and on-street bicycle lanes. The potential pilot program would allow e-bikes on off-street multi-use paths, not including open space trails.
Comments from the public meeting and other outreach events will be used to inform the final pilot proposal.
The Transportation Advisory Board will hold a public hearing on e-bikes on Sept. 23 and make a formal recommendation to City Council. Council will consider the pilot ordinance at a first reading on Oct. 1; a second reading and public hearing will be held on Oct. 22. If approved by council, the pilot project would be launched in November 2013. Based on community feedback and results from the pilot project, council would evaluate whether to continue to allow the use of e-bikes on multi-use paths.
E-bikes are part of the city’s bicycle innovations under review as part of the TMP update’s “living laboratory” concept. Throughout the summer/fall, test facilities and pilot program will be launched to better understand transportation choices and identify strategies that encourage more people in our community to walk and bike.
For more information about the TMP update and to sign up for the ‘Community Feedback Panel’ for bicycle innovations, visit www.BoulderTMP.net. To participate in the online community conversation, visitwww.inspireboulder.com.
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$6 million CU-Boulder instrument to fly on Sept. 6 NASA mission to moon
Aug 29th
A $6 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument designed to study the behavior of lunar dust will be riding on a NASA mission to the moon now slated for launch on Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The mission, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, will orbit the moon to better understand its tenuous atmosphere and whether dust particles are being lofted high off its surface. The $280 million LADEE mission, designed, developed, integrated and tested at NASA’s AMES Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will take about a month to reach the moon and another month to enter the proper elliptical orbit and to commission the instruments. A 100-day science effort will follow.
“We are ready and excited for launch,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, principal investigator for the Lunar Dust Experiment, or LDEX. “We think our instrument can help answer some important questions related to the presence and transport of dust in the lunar atmosphere.”
One unanswered question since the days of the Apollo program is why astronauts saw a pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon, said Horanyi, who directs LASP’s Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies. “The glow has been suggested to be caused by dust particles that were electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, causing them to lift off from the moon’s surface.”
About the size of a small toaster oven, the LDEX instrument will be able to chart the existence, size and individual velocities of tiny dust particles as small as 0.6 microns in diameter. For comparison, a standard sheet of paper is about 100 microns thick. A collision between a dust particle and a hemisphere-shaped target on LDEX generates a unique electrical signal inside the instrument to allow scientists to detect individual particles, said Horanyi.
Horanyi said clouds of dust specks seemingly observed by astronauts hovering over the moon likely weren’t clouds at all. “If you watch a cement truck on the highway, it seems to be carrying a dust cloud along with it. But what is actually happening is that every speck of dirt coming off the truck is falling onto the highway,” he said.
“The specks have very short lifespans, and the cloud that appears to surround the truck is actually a continual rain of dust from the vehicle to the pavement,” he said. “Similarly, the smallest lunar dust particles could also continually lift off and fall back onto the surface.”
Knowing more about the behavior of lunar dust could be of use for future human expeditions to the moon, including potential colonization efforts. Learning more about lunar dust also might help scientists better understand dust on other moons in the solar system — like Phobos and Deimos that orbit Mars – that have been suggested by some as possible initial landing posts for crewed missions headed to the Red Planet.
LADEE also is carrying an ultraviolet and visible light spectrometer, a neutral mass spectrometer and a lunar laser communications demonstration.
Astronauts walking on the moon sank into a shallow layer of dust, thought to be a product of millions of years of meteoric and interstellar particle bombardment, he said. “The beauty of physics is that we believe the same processes occur throughout the universe,” he said. “What we see on the moon may well apply to Mercury, Phobos, Deimos or asteroids, which all have very tenuous atmospheres.”
When the LADEE spacecraft is inserted into an elliptical orbit, its closest approach will be less than 20 miles from the lunar surface. “The closer we can get to the surface the better,” he said.
“This is a very exciting mission that will answer an almost 50-year-old question in space science,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Jamey Szalay, who is writing data analysis software for the mission that will allow the team to analyze science results immediately after data is received from the spacecraft. “Given the convenient duration of the mission and promising science return, I’m very fortunate to be a part of the science team — it’s a dream project for any graduate student in space sciences to be working on.”
Horanyi also is the principal investigator on CU-Boulder’s Student Dust Counter, a simpler instrument than LDEX flying on NASA’s New Horizons mission that was launched in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a massive region beyond the planets containing icy objects left over from the formation of the solar system. The Student Dust Counter was designed, built, tested and operated entirely by students, primarily undergraduates, at LASP and has been collecting data for the past seven years. New Horizons is now more than 2.5 billion miles from Earth and will arrive at Pluto in two years.
CU-Boulder researcher David James, who now is working on LDEX, got his start helping to build SDC. “Although I was a student in a lab back then, it was almost like working in the private sector,” said James, who eventually received his doctorate from CU-Boulder. “We were building an instrument that was going to Pluto. It was an amazing experience with huge responsibilities, it pushed us to do our best, and it definitely shaped who I am today.”
The LDEX instrument, as well as many previous LASP instruments launched into space since the 1970s, will carry a laser engraving of the CU mascot, Ralphie the Buffalo, as well as the names of all university people who participated in the project, from students and scientists to engineers and administrative support staff. “It’s like adding a touch of history to the mission, perhaps for good luck and pride,” said Horanyi. “After all, this is the University of Colorado.”
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