Image Credit: Frans de Wit (Flickr)

Pushing the Limits of Electronic Circuits – Harnessing Terahertz Waves for the Next-Generation of Electronic Devices

 

Adam Zewe | MIT News Office

 

Ruonan Han’s (Associate Professor MIT) research is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to enable new applications in communications, sensing, and security.

Han, an associate professor who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, focuses on producing semiconductors that operate efficiently at very high frequencies in an effort to bridge what is known as the “terahertz gap.”

The terahertz region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which lies between microwaves and infrared light, has largely eluded researchers because conventional electronic devices are too slow to manipulate terahertz waves.

“Traditionally, terahertz has been unexplored territory for researchers simply because, frequency-wise, it is too high for the electronics people and too low for the photonics people,” he says. “We have a lot of limitations in the materials and speeds of devices that can reach those frequencies, but once you get there, a lot of amazing things happen.”

For instance, terahertz frequency waves can move through solid surfaces and generate very precise, high-resolution images of what is inside, Han says.

Radio frequency (RF) waves can travel through surfaces, too — that’s the reason your Wi-Fi router can be in a different room than your computer. But terahertz waves are much smaller than radio waves, so the devices that transmit and receive them can be smaller, too.

Han’s team, along with his collaborator Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, recently demonstrated a terahertz frequency identification (TFID) tag that was barely 1 square millimeter in size.

“It doesn’t need to have any external antennas, so it is essentially just a piece of silicon that is super-cheap, super-small, and can still deliver the functions that a normal RFID tag can do. Because it is so small, you could now tag pretty much any product you want and track logistics information such as the history of manufacturing, etc. We couldn’t do this before, but now it becomes a possibility,” he says.

 

Pictured: Ruonan Han, Photo by M. Scott Brauer

 

Tuning In

A simple radio inspired Han to pursue engineering.

As a child in Inner Mongolia, a province that stretches along China’s northern border, he pored over books filled with circuit schematics and do-it-yourself tips for making printed circuit boards. The primary school student then taught himself to build a radio.

“I couldn’t invest a lot into those electronic components or spend too much time tinkering with them, but that was where the seed was planted,” he says. “I didn’t know all the details of how it worked, but when I turned it on and saw all the components working together it was really amazing.”

Han studied microelectronics at Fudan University in Shanghai, focusing on semiconductor physics, circuit design, and microfabrication.

Rapid advances from Silicon Valley tech companies inspired Han to enroll in a U.S. graduate school. While earning his master’s degree at the University of Florida, he worked in the lab of Kenneth O, a pioneer of the terahertz integrated circuits that now drive Han’s research.

“Back then, terahertz was considered to be ‘too high’ for silicon chips, so a lot of people thought it was a crazy idea. But not me. I felt really fortunate to be able to work with him,” Han says.

He continued this research as a PhD student at Cornell University, where he honed innovative techniques to supercharge the power that silicon chips can generate in the terahertz domain.

“With my Cornell advisor, Ehsan Afshari, we experimented with different types of silicon chips and innovated many mathematics and physics ‘hacks’ to make them run at very high frequencies,” he says.

As the chips became smaller and faster, Han pushed them to their limits.

 

Making Terahertz Accessible

Han brought that innovative spirit to MIT when he joined the EECS faculty as an assistant professor in 2014. He was still pushing the performance limits of silicon chips, now with an eye on practical applications.

“Our goal is not only to work on the electronics, but to explore the applications that these electronics can enable, and demonstrate the feasibility of those applications. One especially important aspect of my research is that we don’t just want to deal with the terahertz spectrum, we want to make it accessible. We don’t want this to just happen inside labs, but to be used by everybody. So, you need to have very low-cost, very reliable components to be able to deliver those kinds of capabilities,” he says.

Han is studying the use of the terahertz band for rapid, high-volume data transfer that could push wireless devices beyond 5G. The terahertz band could be useful for wired communications, too. Han recently demonstrated the use of ultrathin cables to transmit data between two points at a speed of 100 gigabits per second.

Terahertz waves also have unique properties beyond their applications in communications devices. The waves cause different molecules to rotate at unique speeds, so researchers can use terahertz devices to reveal the composition of a substance.

“We can actually make low-cost silicon chips that can ‘smell’ a gas. We’ve created a spectrometer that can simultaneously identify a large range of gas molecules with very low false alarms and high sensitivity. This is something that the other spectrum is not good at,” he says.

Han’s team drew on this work to invent a molecular clock that turns the molecular rotation rate into a highly stable electrical timing signal for navigation, communication, and sensing systems. Although it functions much like an atomic clock, this silicon chip has a simpler structure and greatly reduced cost and size.

Operating in largely unexplored areas makes this work especially challenging, Han says. Despite decades of advances, semiconductor electronics still aren’t fast enough, so Han and his students must constantly innovate to reach the level of efficiency required for terahertz devices.

The work also requires an interdisciplinary mindset. Collaborating with colleagues in other domains, such as chemistry and physics, enables Han to explore how the technology can lead to useful new applications.

Han is glad he’s at MIT, where the students aren’t afraid to take on seemingly intractable problems and he can collaborate with colleagues who are doing incredible research in their domains.

“Every day we are facing new problems and thinking about ideas that other people, even people who work in this field, may consider super-crazy. And this field is in its infancy right now. There are a lot of new emerging materials and components, and new needs and potential applications keep popping up. This is just the beginning. There are going to be very big opportunities lying ahead of us,” he says.

 

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The Far-Reaching Impact of the Signed $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Law

 

Source:

https://news.mit.edu/2021/ruonan-han-circuits-1118

 

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	Image Credit: TLC Johnson (Flickr)

Blockchain 2022 – What’s Next?

 

Applying blockchain to far broader purposes than just creating cryptocurrency will undoubtedly continue into 2022. As with most technology, its adaptation and adoption are likely to compound and improve old and new problems. Over this past year, we witnessed blockchain’s growth in digital art, smart contracts, security, logistics, and identity protection, to name a few. What can we expect from blockchain in 2022? The current trends provide some insight.

 

Blockchain Trends for 2022

According to the website techjury.com, spending on blockchain solutions by businesses is forecast to hit $11.7 billion in 2022. This is up from a projected $6.6 billion in 2021. This Could fuel growth opportunities for investors as well as businesses.

The following are the expected trends that will be driving this massive growth, along with insight on how it may impact our day-to-day lives.

 

Compelling Blockchain Statistics

 

By 2022, worldwide spending on blockchain solutions will reach $11.7 billion. The global blockchain technology market is estimated to accumulate $20 billion in revenue by 2024. The number of registered blockchain wallets in the second quarter of 2021 was more than 70 million. Blockchain can reduce 30% of banks’ infrastructure costs. Financial companies can save up to $12 billion a year from using blockchain. Total spending on integrating blockchain into healthcare will rise to $5.61 billion by 2025. The FBI owns 1.5% of the world’s total bitcoins. 55% of healthcare applications will have adopted blockchain for commercial deployment by 2025. 60% of CIOs were on the verge of integrating blockchain into their infrastructure by the end of 2020.

Source: techjury

 

Greening of Blockchain

There is increasing concern as to the amount of energy consumed in blockchain operations.  In a world where ESG investing and compliance is solidly in favor, the expanded use of carbon-emitting energy would seem to be moving in an adverse direction. Earlier in 2021 Tesla had even stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment because the environmental impact stood in sharp contrast to the cars they sell. In 2022 there is expected to be a greenification of blockchain.

How can blockchain be made cleaner? One way is developing less energy-consuming blockchain technology. Energy consumption is generally lowest in proof-of-stake (POS) algorithms and highest in proof-of-work (POW).

Etherium has plans to move to a POS model during 2022. Cathie Wood, Founder and CEO of Ark Invest, believes it will help lead the way to cleaner energy.  The thought process is that growing demand for energy will lead to greater investments in renewable energy alternatives; this would then be used for other applications in addition to blockchains.

 

NFTs Not Just Art

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) became very talked-about in blockchain news this year. The big “oh wow” came from the attention given to an astronomical price paid for some digital artwork on this still-new medium. The sale created headlines and woke many of us up to the idea that unique digital tokens residing on blockchains could lead to many kinds of asset ownership (not just currencies). Contracts to license sports digital images began a high-tech extension of the sports cards industry.

Blockchain adaptation within the music world also sprang up and should continue its massive growth into next year. Kings of Leon and Jacques Greene are among the artists that forayed into this medium.

In 2021 Distillers William Grant and Son sold bottles of 46-year-old Glenfiddich whiskey at $18,000 per bottle alongside NFTs used to prove each bottle’s origin.

NFTs in gaming is a natural that is taking off. The game Axie Infinity allows players to “mint” their own NFT creatures to send into battle. Nike and Dolce & Gabbana offer clothing and footwear that come with their own NFTs. The metaverse that has recently become part of the general publics’ vernacular with Facebook’s, and Microsft’s announced involvement, will provide opportunities not yet envisioned for blockchain NFT creation.

National Acceptance of Cryptocurrencies

During the Summer of 2021, El Salvador became the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.  Bitcoin can now be accepted across the country to pay for goods and services, and businesses can even use it to pay wages.  Countries as large and as influential as the U.S. are exploring the possibility or method by which they will introduce digital currency.

National cryptocurrency, where the central bank creates tokens they monitor and control, (rather than adopting existing crypto), is an area where growth in blockchain use could surpass expectations in 2022. It’s expected that digital and traditional currency would co-exist and perhaps trade on a 1:1 basis. While the UK Britcoin is unlikely to launch during 2022, other countries, including China, Singapore, and Tunisia have already dipped a toe in the water, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and Estonia are said to be right behind them.

 

The Internet of Things “If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.” – Kevin Ashton, credited with coining the IoT

 

Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT)

Blockchain is highly compatible with IoT. The reason, of course, is that it is great for recording interactions and transactions between machines. Potentially it can solve more problems than created involving security, scalability, encryption, and permanence through the nature of blockchain ledgers. It could even be used for machine-to-machine transactions – enabling micropayments to be made via cryptocurrencies when one machine or network needs services from another.

The infrastructure that will help move these networking advancements forward is the 5G rollout now underway.  It will bring greater connectivity between all smart networked equipment and machines. New data is expected to emerge from IoT and used to continually improve efficiency.

 

 

Blockchain in Vaccine Production and Tracking

Blockchain technology could improve vaccine safety in many ways. It would be particularly useful in distribution and tracking.  In April of this year, Pfizer reported instances of counterfeit Covid 19 shots. Blockchain properties make it now possible to authenticate pharmaceutical shipments, and the distribution can be traced to ensure they are arriving at their intended locations.

The integrity of pharmaceuticals through the entire supply chain can also be tracked. For example, to guarantee that batches of medicines were consistently stored at the correct temperature throughout distribution. IBM has already developed a system to coordinate between the many different and varied agencies and healthcare authorities involved with vaccine distribution using blockchain.

Take-Away

Technology in the modern world has been leading to improved living standards and enhanced lives for well over a hundred years. One of the “front-burner” technologies that will be improving our lives over the coming decade is blockchain’s capabilities. As with other new technology, most future uses haven’t been envisioned yet (ie: the inventor of the wheel hadn’t thought of its use on electric vehicles). For investors, this could lead to the kind of opportunities we experienced throughout the computer revolution from the 1990’s until today. These investment opportunities are likely to be filled with life-changing opportunities to grow wealth, and even bad opportunities to chase after values that have gotten ahead of themselves.

One way to help evaluate these opportunities is to visit Channelchek’s research and data section and type in “blockchain.”

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Sources:

https://techjury.net/blog/blockchain-statistics/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/800426/worldwide-blockchain-solutions-spending/

https://bernardmarr.com/what-is-blockchain/

https://medium.com/@EdChain/pow-vs-pos-a-comparison-of-two-blockchain-consensus-algorithms-f3effdae55f5

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/cathie-wood-s-ark-says-bitcoin-mining-is-good-for-the-planet

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/10/27/glenfiddich-sells-18000-super-rare-whisky-as-nfts–heres-what-that-means/?sh=57d841916b81

https://bernardmarr.com/the-metaverse-explained-with-examples/

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/10/dont-expect-britcoin-soon-says-bank-of-england-fintech-chief/

https://www.statnews.com/2021/10/25/counterfeit-vaccines-medicines-spell-trouble-controlling-covid-19/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-identifies-fake-covid-19-shots-abroad-as-criminals-exploit-vaccine-demand-11619006403

 

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	Image Credit: Frans de Wit (Flickr)

Pushing the Limits of Electronic Circuits – Harnessing Terahertz Waves for the Next-Generation of Electronic Devices

 

Adam Zewe | MIT News Office

 

Ruonan Han’s (Associate Professor MIT) research is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to enable new applications in communications, sensing, and security.

Han, an associate professor who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, focuses on producing semiconductors that operate efficiently at very high frequencies in an effort to bridge what is known as the “terahertz gap.”

The terahertz region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which lies between microwaves and infrared light, has largely eluded researchers because conventional electronic devices are too slow to manipulate terahertz waves.

“Traditionally, terahertz has been unexplored territory for researchers simply because, frequency-wise, it is too high for the electronics people and too low for the photonics people,” he says. “We have a lot of limitations in the materials and speeds of devices that can reach those frequencies, but once you get there, a lot of amazing things happen.”

For instance, terahertz frequency waves can move through solid surfaces and generate very precise, high-resolution images of what is inside, Han says.

Radio frequency (RF) waves can travel through surfaces, too — that’s the reason your Wi-Fi router can be in a different room than your computer. But terahertz waves are much smaller than radio waves, so the devices that transmit and receive them can be smaller, too.

Han’s team, along with his collaborator Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, recently demonstrated a terahertz frequency identification (TFID) tag that was barely 1 square millimeter in size.

“It doesn’t need to have any external antennas, so it is essentially just a piece of silicon that is super-cheap, super-small, and can still deliver the functions that a normal RFID tag can do. Because it is so small, you could now tag pretty much any product you want and track logistics information such as the history of manufacturing, etc. We couldn’t do this before, but now it becomes a possibility,” he says.

 

Pictured: Ruonan Han, Photo by M. Scott Brauer

 

Tuning In

A simple radio inspired Han to pursue engineering.

As a child in Inner Mongolia, a province that stretches along China’s northern border, he pored over books filled with circuit schematics and do-it-yourself tips for making printed circuit boards. The primary school student then taught himself to build a radio.

“I couldn’t invest a lot into those electronic components or spend too much time tinkering with them, but that was where the seed was planted,” he says. “I didn’t know all the details of how it worked, but when I turned it on and saw all the components working together it was really amazing.”

Han studied microelectronics at Fudan University in Shanghai, focusing on semiconductor physics, circuit design, and microfabrication.

Rapid advances from Silicon Valley tech companies inspired Han to enroll in a U.S. graduate school. While earning his master’s degree at the University of Florida, he worked in the lab of Kenneth O, a pioneer of the terahertz integrated circuits that now drive Han’s research.

“Back then, terahertz was considered to be ‘too high’ for silicon chips, so a lot of people thought it was a crazy idea. But not me. I felt really fortunate to be able to work with him,” Han says.

He continued this research as a PhD student at Cornell University, where he honed innovative techniques to supercharge the power that silicon chips can generate in the terahertz domain.

“With my Cornell advisor, Ehsan Afshari, we experimented with different types of silicon chips and innovated many mathematics and physics ‘hacks’ to make them run at very high frequencies,” he says.

As the chips became smaller and faster, Han pushed them to their limits.

 

Making Terahertz Accessible

Han brought that innovative spirit to MIT when he joined the EECS faculty as an assistant professor in 2014. He was still pushing the performance limits of silicon chips, now with an eye on practical applications.

“Our goal is not only to work on the electronics, but to explore the applications that these electronics can enable, and demonstrate the feasibility of those applications. One especially important aspect of my research is that we don’t just want to deal with the terahertz spectrum, we want to make it accessible. We don’t want this to just happen inside labs, but to be used by everybody. So, you need to have very low-cost, very reliable components to be able to deliver those kinds of capabilities,” he says.

Han is studying the use of the terahertz band for rapid, high-volume data transfer that could push wireless devices beyond 5G. The terahertz band could be useful for wired communications, too. Han recently demonstrated the use of ultrathin cables to transmit data between two points at a speed of 100 gigabits per second.

Terahertz waves also have unique properties beyond their applications in communications devices. The waves cause different molecules to rotate at unique speeds, so researchers can use terahertz devices to reveal the composition of a substance.

“We can actually make low-cost silicon chips that can ‘smell’ a gas. We’ve created a spectrometer that can simultaneously identify a large range of gas molecules with very low false alarms and high sensitivity. This is something that the other spectrum is not good at,” he says.

Han’s team drew on this work to invent a molecular clock that turns the molecular rotation rate into a highly stable electrical timing signal for navigation, communication, and sensing systems. Although it functions much like an atomic clock, this silicon chip has a simpler structure and greatly reduced cost and size.

Operating in largely unexplored areas makes this work especially challenging, Han says. Despite decades of advances, semiconductor electronics still aren’t fast enough, so Han and his students must constantly innovate to reach the level of efficiency required for terahertz devices.

The work also requires an interdisciplinary mindset. Collaborating with colleagues in other domains, such as chemistry and physics, enables Han to explore how the technology can lead to useful new applications.

Han is glad he’s at MIT, where the students aren’t afraid to take on seemingly intractable problems and he can collaborate with colleagues who are doing incredible research in their domains.

“Every day we are facing new problems and thinking about ideas that other people, even people who work in this field, may consider super-crazy. And this field is in its infancy right now. There are a lot of new emerging materials and components, and new needs and potential applications keep popping up. This is just the beginning. There are going to be very big opportunities lying ahead of us,” he says.

 

Suggested Reading:

Canadian Bitcoin ETFs May Be Cathie Wood’s Solution

Mobile Artificial Intelligence is an Ever Expanding Technology

Pure Plays in EV Charging Infrastructure

The Far-Reaching Impact of the Signed $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Law

 

Source:

https://news.mit.edu/2021/ruonan-han-circuits-1118

 

Stay up to date. Follow us: