Photonics and optoelectronics
Materials and devices for photonic co-processors
Materials and devices for photonic co-processors: Design and application of phase-change media for next-generation data processing.Modern society depends massively on the generation, processing and transmission of vast amounts of data: it is predicted that by 2025, 175 zettabytes (175 trillion gigabytes) of data will be generated around the globe. Processing such huge amounts of data demands ever increasing computational power, memory and communication bandwidth - demands that cannot be sustainably met by conventional digital electronic technologies. Indeed, CMOS-based von Neumann architectures are now approaching a widely accepted ‘efficiency-wall’ – a fundamental limit on the number of operations per unit energy, while the number of operations required continues to grow at unprecedented rates.