Fifteen years ago, UC Santa Barbara electrical and materials professor John Bowers pioneered a method for integrating a laser onto a silicon wafer. The technology has since been widely deployed in combination with other silicon photonics devices to replace the copper-wire interconnects that formerly linked servers at data centers, dramatically increasing energy efficiency—an important endeavor at a time when data traffic is growing by roughly 25% per year.
For several years, the Bowers group has collaborated with the group of Tobias J. Kippenberg at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Direct On-Chip Digital Optical Synthesizer (DODOS) program. The Kippenberg group discovered "microcombs," a series of parallel, low-noise, highly stable laser lines. Each of the many lines of the laser comb can carry information, extensively multiplying the amount of data that can be sent by a single laser.
To read more, click here.