Category: Photonics

ECE researchers Hamed Dalir, PhD, and Elham Heidari, PhD, are collaborating with Relative Dynamics on a project recently funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which promises to expand the sensitivity of gravitational wave observatories such as LIGO and the planned space-based LISA mission, while also advancing applications in quantum magnetometry, fiber-optic gyroscopes, and biological imaging.

A team of engineers has developed a new kind of computer chip that uses light instead of electricity to perform one of the most power-intensive parts of artificial intelligence — image recognition and similar pattern-finding tasks.

Using light dramatically cuts the power needed to perform these tasks, with efficiency 10 or even 100 times that of current chips performing the same calculations. Using this approach could help rein in the enormous demand for electricity that is straining power grids and enable higher performance AI models and systems.

Hamed Dalir, PhD, is part of a nationally-funded initiative to develop a transformative three-dimensional optical packaging platform that redefines how data is routed across and between chips. The project is led by Ali Adibi, PhD, professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with Dalir, Juejun Hu, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues at AIM Photonics, and nHanced Semiconductor. The team aims to unlock new levels of scalability, bandwidth, and energy efficiency by vertically stacking photonic layers and enabling seamless chip-to-chip optical communication.

The CHIP Lab, led by Hamed Dalir, Ph.D., has been awarded up to $435,000 by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, to pioneer a transformative approach to analog-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analog (DAC) conversion for next-generation AI accelerator processors.

A new paper by researchers at UF Electrical & Computer Engineering has recently been published in ACS Photonics, outlining recent work in the area of tunable lasers. “Tunable Laser Using Transverse Cavity Surface Emitting Laser Working near Exceptional Point,” was authored by Elham Heidari, Ph.D., and her research group.

The CHIP Lab, led by Dr. Hamed Dalir, has received $435,000 in funding from SRC to enhance photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and ferroelectric-tunable transparent conductive materials for high-performance computing applications.

Dr. Hamed Dalir has received funding to advance research on a “Novel Long-Range Acoustic Method for Decadal Monitoring of Plugged and Abandoned (P&A) Wells.” This groundbreaking project aims to revolutionize the monitoring of P&A wells using advanced acoustic techniques.