UW ECE is Hiring!
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track associate and assistant professor positions.
https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/uw-ece-is-hiring-3/
https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/new-lens-system-for-endoscopes/
New lens system for endoscopes could allow physicians to see inside the body like never before
A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has designed a new kind of lens system for the tip of an endoscope, which could enable physicians to view and treat areas deep inside the body.
https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/the-need-for-speed/
The need for speed — Sajjad Moazeni receives NSF grant to develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers supporting AI and machine learning in the cloud
UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an optical interconnect that will be fast, compact, and energy efficient.
https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/2024-25-lytle-lecture-yong-rui/
Yong Rui, Corporate CTO and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group, to give 2024–25 Lytle Lecture
Rui will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium.
https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/professor-kai-mei-fu-elected-american-physical-society-fellow/
Professor Kai-Mei Fu elected American Physical Society Fellow
UW ECE and Physics Professor Kai-Mei Fu has been elected an APS Fellow for research that has applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/09/23/how-the-remote-hub-lab-can-prepare-engineering-students-for-their-future-careers/
How the Remote Hub Lab is preparing engineering students for their future careers
The Remote Hub Lab, founded and led by UW ECE Associate Teaching Professor Rania Hussein, allows students to access physical engineering equipment from anywhere in the world.
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[_finalHTML:protected] => https://ece.uw.edu/spotlight/uw-ece-is-hiring-3/UW ECE is Hiring!
UW ECE is inviting applications for tenure-track associate and assistant professor positions.
New lens system for endoscopes could allow physicians to see inside the body like never before
A research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has designed a new kind of lens system for the tip of an endoscope, which could enable physicians to view and treat areas deep inside the body.
The need for speed — Sajjad Moazeni receives NSF grant to develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers supporting AI and machine learning in the cloud
UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an optical interconnect that will be fast, compact, and energy efficient.
Yong Rui, Corporate CTO and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group, to give 2024–25 Lytle Lecture
Rui will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium.
Professor Kai-Mei Fu elected American Physical Society Fellow
UW ECE and Physics Professor Kai-Mei Fu has been elected an APS Fellow for research that has applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies.
How the Remote Hub Lab is preparing engineering students for their future careers
The Remote Hub Lab, founded and led by UW ECE Associate Teaching Professor Rania Hussein, allows students to access physical engineering equipment from anywhere in the world.
An illustration of the endoscope lens system designed by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his research team. A coin-shaped metalens at the front end of the endoscope directs three cones of red, green, and blue light to a rainbow of focal spots that probe the three-dimensional target (spoked wheel at right). The lens system then directs reflected light through the endoscope (middle) via an optical fiber bundle. A color camera creates the image at the other end of the endoscope (left) with a built-in color filter, shown here as pixelated color cubes. The camera (left) outputs three color images (RGB), corresponding to the three different depths described by the lens system. Image provided by Aamod Shanker.[/caption]
The human body contains a vast, complex, and interconnected web of organic tunnels and passageways that weave their way through the cardiovascular, respiratory, and digestive systems. For physicians, reaching into this maze of arteries, bronchial tubes, and gastrointestinal chambers to view and treat diseased or damaged tissue can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Many of these conduits are long and winding but small in diameter, and they can narrow down to microscopic dimensions. Medical devices built to navigate and optically view these areas must be flexible, maneuverable, and carry a light source.
One such device is an endoscope, which is a long, thin, flexible tube with a light, and sometimes a camera, attached. It has long been a tool of choice for doctors and surgeons alike for detecting, viewing, and treating a wide range of diseases and conditions, such as blood clots in the heart, airway blockages, and the early stages of colon cancer. However, this device has its limitations. The size of most endoscopes used today is too big and bulky to access many of the body’s smaller spaces, such as arteries in the brain or bronchioles in the lungs. One of the limiting factors is the camera lens and light source needed at the front end, which the physician uses to move the scope toward detecting, viewing, and treating diseased or damaged tissue.
But now, a research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has designed a new kind of lens system for the tip of an endoscope, which could enable physicians to view and treat areas deep inside the body. The research team reported their findings in a paper published this month in the Nature journal Light: Science & Applications. To build this device, the team engineered a metalens — a flat, lightweight optical component that uses microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. Metalenses are used in a wide variety of technologies where space is limited, for example, in smartphone cameras.
“A lot of people developing endoscopy are working on the software, the computational side,” Majumdar said. “Our team chose to develop a metalens for the optical hardware in an endoscope, and as our work progressed, we realized that many improvements were possible.”
[caption id="attachment_35634" align="alignright" width="575"]
From left to right, UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar, lead author Aamod Shanker, and Eric Seibel, a UW research professor in mechanical engineering. Photo of Arka Majumdar by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
The tiny, flat metalens the team designed could enable the diameter of the smallest endoscopes in use today to be shrunk by more than 50 percent, which, in turn, would empower the user to look deeper into hard-to-reach spaces inside the body. The advance could allow physicians to access areas never seen before by optical imaging, such as blood clots deep in the brain and diseased arteries anywhere in the body, including the heart. This is very good news for patients, especially for treatment of common cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack and stroke, which, combined, are the number one cause of premature death in the world.
An endoscope equipped with a lens system like the one the research team has developed could provide physicians with visual feedback in real time. This translates to higher efficiency, fewer medical errors, and a higher success rate for each medical procedure. The system also provides higher resolution and better contrast than an X-ray, without the unwanted side effects of radiation.
“We are trying to extend the eyes of the surgeon or the physician deeper into the body,” said Eric Seibel, a UW research professor in mechanical engineering, who co-authored the paper and has been engineering endoscopes for decades. “This is an area that I have been working in for 25 years, and this new technology has the potential to leapfrog over my past work. I’m very excited about this device.”
Leveraging chromatic aberration in a metalens
This new metalens system uses quantitative phase imaging — a microscopy technique that measures the phase of light as it passes through a transparent or semi-transparent sample — and depth sensing to render a three dimensional, full-color video in real time with very little computing needed. It also is tiny, with an aperture width of 0.5 millimeters, which is about the width of five human hairs laid side to side. Today, there is a good amount of research being done on metalenses that use quantitative phase imaging and depth sensing, but not with an endoscopic application in mind. That is part of what makes this device unique.
Another unique aspect of this optical hardware is that it uses chromatic aberration for depth sensing and building the three-dimensional image. Chromatic aberration is present in almost all lenses and is usually considered to be a nuisance. It is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point, and it can cause colored fringes to appear in images produced by an uncorrected lens. But the research team found a way to turn this flaw into a feature.
“Using a tiny, flat metalens, we create a chromatic splitting along focus, causing each color to converge at a different depth. In the reverse direction, this longitudinal rainbow effect allows for mapping depth into the color channels of a camera,” said Aamod Shanker, who was the paper’s lead author and is now a research fellow at the Iberian National Laboratory, Portugal. Shanker took part in this work while he was a postdoctoral researcher in Majumdar’s lab and in the lab of Steve Brunton, a UW professor in mechanical engineering, who also co-authored the paper.
This research took place primarily in Majumdar’s lab and at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility over a two-year period. Other UW ECE-affiliated co-authors of the paper were postdoctoral researchers Johannes Fröch and Saswata Mukherjee as well as UW ECE doctoral student Maksym Zhelyeznyakov. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.
A vision for the future
Now that the team has produced a proof of concept, next steps include building a prototype to test in a physical model of a human organ. With additional funding, Majumdar and Seibel estimate that this will be about a two-year process. The type of optics the team has developed, meta optics, can be fabricated and packaged at a large scale, which provides a unique opportunity to bring this lens system into the medical marketplace. They also plan to guide the technology through clinical studies over the next decade and beyond.
“This chromatic aberration providing information about depth is good, but this is still experimental,” Majumdar said. “To get what a surgeon needs, we need to improve the image quality, and that’s what we are pushing toward.”
Seibel emphasized the human impact this technology could have in the future.
“This is an application of meta optics that has the potential to make a practical impact in everybody’s lives, with a significant amount of development work,” he said. “It may take 20 more years to make that impact. But it’s a technology that has great potential, and everyone should start paying attention to it.”
Learn more about this research in the Lights: Science & Applications journal. More information about UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar is on his bio page. The CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund helps to move University of Washington innovations to the next stage of development and investment. Applications for the next funding cycle open up on January 30, 2025.
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UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to envision and develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers — one that will be compact, energy efficient, and speedy enough to support the next generation of AI, machine learning and other compute-intensive applications run in the cloud. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
In data centers today, there is a constant need for speed. And it’s not only inside computer data servers, where one might think it would be. Computing power, capacity, and speed has been increasing at a fast clip for years now in response to market demand, and many artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, such as ChatGPT, Google Search, and Alexa can attest to this fact. However, data center servers, also known as “the cloud,” are only as fast and as powerful as the infrastructure that supports them. And the next generation of AI, machine learning, and other computationally intensive applications will demand data transfer rates that are expected to increase exponentially in the coming years.
A key part of data center infrastructure are optical interconnects, which function as a bridge between electrical and photonic signals and connect data server clusters to fiber optic cables for data transmission at the speed of light. As the central processing units, or CPUs, within these data servers become more powerful and computational demands for speed continue to increase, optical interconnects must also advance to keep up. But pushing optical interconnects beyond what they already can do is a difficult challenge. Speed and data capacity are pressing concerns, but so are the size and complexity of the interconnects as well as their energy efficiency. Addressing these factors while engineers are reaching the ceiling for the number of transistors that can be placed on a semiconductor chip (an upper limit known as the end of Moore’s Law) will take creativity and innovation.
Now, UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to envision and develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers — one that will be compact, energy efficient, and speedy enough to support the next generation of AI, machine learning and other compute-intensive applications run in the cloud.
“All sorts of applications, from ChatGPT all the way to the processors used to run simulations for physics, chemistry, and medicine rely on powerful computers and the infrastructure located in data centers,’” Moazeni said. “We need to scale up optical interconnects as we build newer applications and newer, more powerful processors. This requires a lot of research and a paradigm shift.”
Coherent co-packaged optical interconnects
To help shift the paradigm for optical interconnects, Moazeni is taking a technique used in long-distance fiber optic telecommunication lines called “coherent optical transmission” and applying it to the optical interconnects used in data centers. Most interconnects used in data centers today are optical; however, these connectors only transmit data on the amplitude of light signals streaming through fiber optic cables. By contrast, coherent optical transmission imprints data on both the amplitude and the phase of the light, which doubles the amount of information the optical interconnect can send.
"It's important to note that we’re building this device. It is not just computer simulations or abstract papers. This research is going to result in actual chips in the lab being tested, verified, and characterized." — UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni
One barrier to using this technique inside data centers is that coherent optical interconnects take more energy while transmitting data because more signal processing is needed to recover the phase and amplitude and decouple them from each other. Moazeni is addressing this challenge by embedding the optical interconnect into a silicon photonic chip (an optical and electronic circuit on a silicon microchip) that is then “co-packaged” alongside the CPU. Placing the electro-optical conversion as close as possible to the CPU has several benefits, including making the optical interconnect fast, compact, and energy efficient. Moazeni said he expects that using coherent optical transmission and co-packaging the optical interconnect with the CPU will increase total data transfer speeds by 10 times and in a much smaller form factor. It will also make this new kind of interconnect almost 10 times more energy efficient as compared to standard coherent optical interconnects in use today.
“What we are trying to do in this research is merge two different domains of interconnects,” Moazeni said. “ We are taking the coherent concept and principle from telecommunication and making it suitable for shorter links inside the data center.”
Education, commercialization and next steps
Moazeni is leveraging this work to provide educational opportunities for students at UW ECE. Graduate students and undergraduate students will contribute to the research under Moazeni’s supervision as he develops this coherent co-packaged optical interconnect. And because blending silicon photonic chips with optical devices built into electronics is a new area, Moazeni is building the topic into courses that he teaches. He is also putting together related tasks appropriate for high school student interns. He said he hopes that through coursework and hands-on projects, students will become excited about this technology, and it will encourage them to dig deeper into studying silicon photonic chip design.
Over the next three years, Moazeni and his research team will build a prototype of the coherent co-packaged optical interconnect chip with assistance from GlobalFoundries, which is providing silicon photonic technologies and the fabrication process for the chip through a university partnership program. Moazeni also plans to commercialize this interconnect. He anticipates that it could be in data centers five to 10 years from now, depending on the market.
“We are combining two future trends together,” Moazeni said. “One is co-packaged optics, the other is bringing coherent optical interconnects into the data center. And it’s also important to note that we’re building this device. It is not just computer simulations or abstract papers. This research is going to result in actual chips in the lab being tested, verified, and characterized.”
Learn more about this research on the NSF website and more about UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni on his UW ECE bio page.
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Yong Rui, Corporate CTO and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group, will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium.[/caption]
UW ECE is proud to welcome technology leader and artificial intelligence expert Yong Rui, who will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium. Rui is the Corporate Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group. He oversees a $2.5B research and development budget and directs Lenovo’s technical strategies and R&D directions. Additionally, Rui leads Lenovo Research, which investigates AI, 5G/6G, XR/metaverse, intelligent devices, intelligent computing infrastructure, and smart vertical solutions. This lecture is free to attend and open to the public.
RSVP to attend the 2024–25 Lytle Lecture
Rui’s talk will focus on how to bring AI into real-world applications, from an implementation point of view and from an industry perspective. He will also discuss hybrid AI models by examining existing and upcoming technologies and products across the AI industry. Hybrid AI models combine different AI technologies to solve complex problems more efficiently.
“Dr. Rui is a renowned expert with years of experience in AI and computer vision, having conducted and led the development of disruptive technologies in real-time communications, AI systems, and advanced computing technologies, among others, at Microsoft and Lenovo,” said UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel, who co-chairs the Dean W. Lytle Electrical & Computer Engineering Endowed Lecture Series with UW ECE Affiliate Professor Henrique (Rico) Malvar.
The Dean W. Lytle Electrical & Computer Engineering Endowed Lecture Series is the Department’s premier annual event, featuring internationally renowned researchers in communications, signal processing, control systems, and machine learning. The lectureship is made possible by an endowment established in 2006, the centennial year of the Department, through fundraising efforts led by Louis Scharf (Ph.D. ‘69), a doctoral student of Professor Lytle, in collaboration with Lytle’s wife, Marilyn, and support from the Lytle family. Many members of the UW ECE community responded with generous donations to honor Professor Lytle, including his graduate students, his colleagues at Honeywell’s Marine Systems Center as well as alumni and friends.
For more information about Rui and the Lytle Lecture, visit the Lytle Lecture Series webpage.
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UW ECE and Physics Professor Kai-Mei Fu has been elected an APS Fellow for research that has applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Kai-Mei Fu, the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, has been elected an American Physical Society Fellow. Fu was recently elected to the APS Division of Quantum Information Fellowship for foundational contributions to fundamental and applied research on the optical and spin properties of quantum point defects in crystals. Fu was also recognized for their service and leadership in the quantum community.
Fu directs the Quantum Defect Laboratory at the UW, where their research focuses on identifying and controlling the quantum properties of point defects in crystals, which have a wide array of applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies. Fu is also the director of the University’s NSF National Research Training program: Accelerating Quantum-Enabled Technologies and is co-chair of the University’s interdisciplinary QuantumX Steering Committee. They are the deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Quantum Initiative Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, and they hold a joint appointment with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Among other notable accomplishments, Fu has been instrumental in leading the establishment of the UW Graduate Certificate in Quantum Information Science and Engineering at the University. In addition to the APS Fellowship, Fu has received several other awards and honors for their work in research and education, including an NSF CAREER Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award and a UW College of Engineering Junior Faculty Award.
The APS recognizes its members for their outstanding efforts to advance physics and becoming an APS Fellow is considered to be a great honor. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of APS membership are elected as Fellows. The APS only elects members to Fellowship who have contributed to the advancement of physics by independent, original research or who have rendered other special service to the cause of the sciences.
More information about Professor Kai-Mei Fu can be found on their UW ECE bio page.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_35630" align="alignright" width="575"] An illustration of the endoscope lens system designed by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar and his research team. A coin-shaped metalens at the front end of the endoscope directs three cones of red, green, and blue light to a rainbow of focal spots that probe the three-dimensional target (spoked wheel at right). The lens system then directs reflected light through the endoscope (middle) via an optical fiber bundle. A color camera creates the image at the other end of the endoscope (left) with a built-in color filter, shown here as pixelated color cubes. The camera (left) outputs three color images (RGB), corresponding to the three different depths described by the lens system. Image provided by Aamod Shanker.[/caption]
The human body contains a vast, complex, and interconnected web of organic tunnels and passageways that weave their way through the cardiovascular, respiratory, and digestive systems. For physicians, reaching into this maze of arteries, bronchial tubes, and gastrointestinal chambers to view and treat diseased or damaged tissue can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Many of these conduits are long and winding but small in diameter, and they can narrow down to microscopic dimensions. Medical devices built to navigate and optically view these areas must be flexible, maneuverable, and carry a light source.
One such device is an endoscope, which is a long, thin, flexible tube with a light, and sometimes a camera, attached. It has long been a tool of choice for doctors and surgeons alike for detecting, viewing, and treating a wide range of diseases and conditions, such as blood clots in the heart, airway blockages, and the early stages of colon cancer. However, this device has its limitations. The size of most endoscopes used today is too big and bulky to access many of the body’s smaller spaces, such as arteries in the brain or bronchioles in the lungs. One of the limiting factors is the camera lens and light source needed at the front end, which the physician uses to move the scope toward detecting, viewing, and treating diseased or damaged tissue.
But now, a research team led by UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar has designed a new kind of lens system for the tip of an endoscope, which could enable physicians to view and treat areas deep inside the body. The research team reported their findings in a paper published this month in the Nature journal Light: Science & Applications. To build this device, the team engineered a metalens — a flat, lightweight optical component that uses microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. Metalenses are used in a wide variety of technologies where space is limited, for example, in smartphone cameras.
“A lot of people developing endoscopy are working on the software, the computational side,” Majumdar said. “Our team chose to develop a metalens for the optical hardware in an endoscope, and as our work progressed, we realized that many improvements were possible.”
[caption id="attachment_35634" align="alignright" width="575"] From left to right, UW ECE and Physics Professor Arka Majumdar, lead author Aamod Shanker, and Eric Seibel, a UW research professor in mechanical engineering. Photo of Arka Majumdar by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
The tiny, flat metalens the team designed could enable the diameter of the smallest endoscopes in use today to be shrunk by more than 50 percent, which, in turn, would empower the user to look deeper into hard-to-reach spaces inside the body. The advance could allow physicians to access areas never seen before by optical imaging, such as blood clots deep in the brain and diseased arteries anywhere in the body, including the heart. This is very good news for patients, especially for treatment of common cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack and stroke, which, combined, are the number one cause of premature death in the world.
An endoscope equipped with a lens system like the one the research team has developed could provide physicians with visual feedback in real time. This translates to higher efficiency, fewer medical errors, and a higher success rate for each medical procedure. The system also provides higher resolution and better contrast than an X-ray, without the unwanted side effects of radiation.
“We are trying to extend the eyes of the surgeon or the physician deeper into the body,” said Eric Seibel, a UW research professor in mechanical engineering, who co-authored the paper and has been engineering endoscopes for decades. “This is an area that I have been working in for 25 years, and this new technology has the potential to leapfrog over my past work. I’m very excited about this device.”
Leveraging chromatic aberration in a metalens
This new metalens system uses quantitative phase imaging — a microscopy technique that measures the phase of light as it passes through a transparent or semi-transparent sample — and depth sensing to render a three dimensional, full-color video in real time with very little computing needed. It also is tiny, with an aperture width of 0.5 millimeters, which is about the width of five human hairs laid side to side. Today, there is a good amount of research being done on metalenses that use quantitative phase imaging and depth sensing, but not with an endoscopic application in mind. That is part of what makes this device unique.
Another unique aspect of this optical hardware is that it uses chromatic aberration for depth sensing and building the three-dimensional image. Chromatic aberration is present in almost all lenses and is usually considered to be a nuisance. It is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point, and it can cause colored fringes to appear in images produced by an uncorrected lens. But the research team found a way to turn this flaw into a feature.
“Using a tiny, flat metalens, we create a chromatic splitting along focus, causing each color to converge at a different depth. In the reverse direction, this longitudinal rainbow effect allows for mapping depth into the color channels of a camera,” said Aamod Shanker, who was the paper’s lead author and is now a research fellow at the Iberian National Laboratory, Portugal. Shanker took part in this work while he was a postdoctoral researcher in Majumdar’s lab and in the lab of Steve Brunton, a UW professor in mechanical engineering, who also co-authored the paper.
This research took place primarily in Majumdar’s lab and at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility over a two-year period. Other UW ECE-affiliated co-authors of the paper were postdoctoral researchers Johannes Fröch and Saswata Mukherjee as well as UW ECE doctoral student Maksym Zhelyeznyakov. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund.
A vision for the future
Now that the team has produced a proof of concept, next steps include building a prototype to test in a physical model of a human organ. With additional funding, Majumdar and Seibel estimate that this will be about a two-year process. The type of optics the team has developed, meta optics, can be fabricated and packaged at a large scale, which provides a unique opportunity to bring this lens system into the medical marketplace. They also plan to guide the technology through clinical studies over the next decade and beyond.
“This chromatic aberration providing information about depth is good, but this is still experimental,” Majumdar said. “To get what a surgeon needs, we need to improve the image quality, and that’s what we are pushing toward.”
Seibel emphasized the human impact this technology could have in the future.
“This is an application of meta optics that has the potential to make a practical impact in everybody’s lives, with a significant amount of development work,” he said. “It may take 20 more years to make that impact. But it’s a technology that has great potential, and everyone should start paying attention to it.”
Learn more about this research in the Lights: Science & Applications journal. More information about UW ECE and Physics Associate Professor Arka Majumdar is on his bio page. The CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund helps to move University of Washington innovations to the next stage of development and investment. Applications for the next funding cycle open up on January 30, 2025.
[post_title] => New lens system for endoscopes could allow physicians to see inside the body like never before
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[post_date] => 2024-10-18 08:42:16
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_35507" align="alignright" width="575"] UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to envision and develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers — one that will be compact, energy efficient, and speedy enough to support the next generation of AI, machine learning and other compute-intensive applications run in the cloud. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
In data centers today, there is a constant need for speed. And it’s not only inside computer data servers, where one might think it would be. Computing power, capacity, and speed has been increasing at a fast clip for years now in response to market demand, and many artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, such as ChatGPT, Google Search, and Alexa can attest to this fact. However, data center servers, also known as “the cloud,” are only as fast and as powerful as the infrastructure that supports them. And the next generation of AI, machine learning, and other computationally intensive applications will demand data transfer rates that are expected to increase exponentially in the coming years.
A key part of data center infrastructure are optical interconnects, which function as a bridge between electrical and photonic signals and connect data server clusters to fiber optic cables for data transmission at the speed of light. As the central processing units, or CPUs, within these data servers become more powerful and computational demands for speed continue to increase, optical interconnects must also advance to keep up. But pushing optical interconnects beyond what they already can do is a difficult challenge. Speed and data capacity are pressing concerns, but so are the size and complexity of the interconnects as well as their energy efficiency. Addressing these factors while engineers are reaching the ceiling for the number of transistors that can be placed on a semiconductor chip (an upper limit known as the end of Moore’s Law) will take creativity and innovation.
Now, UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to envision and develop a new kind of optical interconnect for data centers — one that will be compact, energy efficient, and speedy enough to support the next generation of AI, machine learning and other compute-intensive applications run in the cloud.
“All sorts of applications, from ChatGPT all the way to the processors used to run simulations for physics, chemistry, and medicine rely on powerful computers and the infrastructure located in data centers,’” Moazeni said. “We need to scale up optical interconnects as we build newer applications and newer, more powerful processors. This requires a lot of research and a paradigm shift.”
Coherent co-packaged optical interconnects
To help shift the paradigm for optical interconnects, Moazeni is taking a technique used in long-distance fiber optic telecommunication lines called “coherent optical transmission” and applying it to the optical interconnects used in data centers. Most interconnects used in data centers today are optical; however, these connectors only transmit data on the amplitude of light signals streaming through fiber optic cables. By contrast, coherent optical transmission imprints data on both the amplitude and the phase of the light, which doubles the amount of information the optical interconnect can send.
"It's important to note that we’re building this device. It is not just computer simulations or abstract papers. This research is going to result in actual chips in the lab being tested, verified, and characterized." — UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni
One barrier to using this technique inside data centers is that coherent optical interconnects take more energy while transmitting data because more signal processing is needed to recover the phase and amplitude and decouple them from each other. Moazeni is addressing this challenge by embedding the optical interconnect into a silicon photonic chip (an optical and electronic circuit on a silicon microchip) that is then “co-packaged” alongside the CPU. Placing the electro-optical conversion as close as possible to the CPU has several benefits, including making the optical interconnect fast, compact, and energy efficient. Moazeni said he expects that using coherent optical transmission and co-packaging the optical interconnect with the CPU will increase total data transfer speeds by 10 times and in a much smaller form factor. It will also make this new kind of interconnect almost 10 times more energy efficient as compared to standard coherent optical interconnects in use today.
“What we are trying to do in this research is merge two different domains of interconnects,” Moazeni said. “ We are taking the coherent concept and principle from telecommunication and making it suitable for shorter links inside the data center.”
Education, commercialization and next steps
Moazeni is leveraging this work to provide educational opportunities for students at UW ECE. Graduate students and undergraduate students will contribute to the research under Moazeni’s supervision as he develops this coherent co-packaged optical interconnect. And because blending silicon photonic chips with optical devices built into electronics is a new area, Moazeni is building the topic into courses that he teaches. He is also putting together related tasks appropriate for high school student interns. He said he hopes that through coursework and hands-on projects, students will become excited about this technology, and it will encourage them to dig deeper into studying silicon photonic chip design.
Over the next three years, Moazeni and his research team will build a prototype of the coherent co-packaged optical interconnect chip with assistance from GlobalFoundries, which is providing silicon photonic technologies and the fabrication process for the chip through a university partnership program. Moazeni also plans to commercialize this interconnect. He anticipates that it could be in data centers five to 10 years from now, depending on the market.
“We are combining two future trends together,” Moazeni said. “One is co-packaged optics, the other is bringing coherent optical interconnects into the data center. And it’s also important to note that we’re building this device. It is not just computer simulations or abstract papers. This research is going to result in actual chips in the lab being tested, verified, and characterized.”
Learn more about this research on the NSF website and more about UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni on his UW ECE bio page.
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_35476" align="alignright" width="500"] Yong Rui, Corporate CTO and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group, will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium.[/caption]
UW ECE is proud to welcome technology leader and artificial intelligence expert Yong Rui, who will deliver the Department’s annual Lytle Lecture on Thursday, October 17, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the Paul Allen Center Atrium. Rui is the Corporate Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group. He oversees a $2.5B research and development budget and directs Lenovo’s technical strategies and R&D directions. Additionally, Rui leads Lenovo Research, which investigates AI, 5G/6G, XR/metaverse, intelligent devices, intelligent computing infrastructure, and smart vertical solutions. This lecture is free to attend and open to the public.
RSVP to attend the 2024–25 Lytle Lecture
Rui’s talk will focus on how to bring AI into real-world applications, from an implementation point of view and from an industry perspective. He will also discuss hybrid AI models by examining existing and upcoming technologies and products across the AI industry. Hybrid AI models combine different AI technologies to solve complex problems more efficiently.
“Dr. Rui is a renowned expert with years of experience in AI and computer vision, having conducted and led the development of disruptive technologies in real-time communications, AI systems, and advanced computing technologies, among others, at Microsoft and Lenovo,” said UW ECE Professor Maryam Fazel, who co-chairs the Dean W. Lytle Electrical & Computer Engineering Endowed Lecture Series with UW ECE Affiliate Professor Henrique (Rico) Malvar.
The Dean W. Lytle Electrical & Computer Engineering Endowed Lecture Series is the Department’s premier annual event, featuring internationally renowned researchers in communications, signal processing, control systems, and machine learning. The lectureship is made possible by an endowment established in 2006, the centennial year of the Department, through fundraising efforts led by Louis Scharf (Ph.D. ‘69), a doctoral student of Professor Lytle, in collaboration with Lytle’s wife, Marilyn, and support from the Lytle family. Many members of the UW ECE community responded with generous donations to honor Professor Lytle, including his graduate students, his colleagues at Honeywell’s Marine Systems Center as well as alumni and friends.
For more information about Rui and the Lytle Lecture, visit the Lytle Lecture Series webpage.
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_35445" align="alignright" width="525"] UW ECE and Physics Professor Kai-Mei Fu has been elected an APS Fellow for research that has applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE[/caption]
Kai-Mei Fu, the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, has been elected an American Physical Society Fellow. Fu was recently elected to the APS Division of Quantum Information Fellowship for foundational contributions to fundamental and applied research on the optical and spin properties of quantum point defects in crystals. Fu was also recognized for their service and leadership in the quantum community.
Fu directs the Quantum Defect Laboratory at the UW, where their research focuses on identifying and controlling the quantum properties of point defects in crystals, which have a wide array of applications in quantum computing, quantum networks, and sensing technologies. Fu is also the director of the University’s NSF National Research Training program: Accelerating Quantum-Enabled Technologies and is co-chair of the University’s interdisciplinary QuantumX Steering Committee. They are the deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Quantum Initiative Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, and they hold a joint appointment with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Among other notable accomplishments, Fu has been instrumental in leading the establishment of the UW Graduate Certificate in Quantum Information Science and Engineering at the University. In addition to the APS Fellowship, Fu has received several other awards and honors for their work in research and education, including an NSF CAREER Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award and a UW College of Engineering Junior Faculty Award.
The APS recognizes its members for their outstanding efforts to advance physics and becoming an APS Fellow is considered to be a great honor. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of APS membership are elected as Fellows. The APS only elects members to Fellowship who have contributed to the advancement of physics by independent, original research or who have rendered other special service to the cause of the sciences.
More information about Professor Kai-Mei Fu can be found on their UW ECE bio page.
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