Infinera extends CHIPS Act funding to $93 million...

23 Oct 2024

...and U Michigan develops pulsed, helical laser to control optical communications.

Infinera, a developer of open optical networking solutions and optical semiconductors and the U.S. Department of Commerce have signed an agreement for Infinera to receive up to $93 million in direct funding as part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.

The proposed funding, when combined with investment tax credits available under the CHIPS and Science Act, could result in more than $200 million in total federal incentives as well as potential state and local incentives.

The company’s statement of October 17th said, “This [funding] would support the expansion and modernization of both Infinera’s semiconductor capabilities in Silicon Valley, California and its advanced test and packaging capabilities in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, increasing the company’s existing domestic manufacturing capacity by an estimated factor of ten.”

Combined proposed funding for these two projects could create up to 1,700 manufacturing and construction jobs while strengthening America’s supply chain, economic and national security, the company added.

“We are grateful for the bipartisan efforts under the CHIPS and Science Act to increase semiconductor fabrication and packaging in the U.S. and protect our national and economic security,” said David Heard, Infinera CEO.

“The proposed CHIPS funding will enable us to better secure our supply chain and compete more effectively with foreign adversary nations. Our photonic semiconductors address the increased demand for bandwidth from consumers while opening new markets inside the data center driven by the explosive growth in AI workloads,” added Heard.

U Michigan develops pulsed, helical laser to control optical communications

A University of Michigan-led research team has demonstrated an ultrafast all-optical switch by pulsing circularly polarized light, which twists like a helix, through an optical cavity lined with an ultrathin semiconductor. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.

The device could function as a standard optical switch, where turning a control laser on or off switches the signal beam of the same polarization, or as a type of logic gate called Exclusive OR (XOR) switch, which would produce an output signal when one light input twists clockwise and the other is counterclockwise but not when both inputs are the same.

“Because a switch is the most elementary building block of any information processing unit, an all-optical switch is the first step towards all optical computing or building optical neural networks,” said Lingxiao Zhou, a physics doctoral student at U-M and lead author of the Nature Communications study.

Optical computing’s low loss advantage

“Extremely low power consumption is a key to optical computing’s success. The work done by our team addresses just this problem, using unusual two dimensional materials to switch data at very low energies per bit,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering at U-M and contributing author of the study.

To achieve this, the researchers pulsed a helical laser at regular intervals through an optical cavity—a set of mirrors that trap and bounce light back and forth multiple times—boosting the strength of the laser by two orders of magnitude.

When a one-molecule-thick layer of the semiconductor tungsten diselenide (WSe₂) is embedded within the optical cavity, the strong, oscillating light enlarges the electronic bands of the available electrons in the semiconductor — a nonlinear optical effect known as the optical Stark effect. This means that when an electron jumps to a higher orbital, it absorbs more energy, and it emits more energy when it jumps down, known as blue shifting. This in turn modifies the signal light’s fluence, the amount of energy delivered or reflected per unit area.

“Our results open doors to a lot of new possibilities, both in fundamental science where controlling time reversal symmetry is a requirement for creating exotic states of matter and for technology, where leveraging such a huge magnetic field becomes possible,” said Hui Deng, a professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering at U-M and corresponding author of the study.