Integrated electronic-photonic chip shows promise for data centres

According to Caltech, the new design – developed with researchers at Southampton University - could influence the future of data centres that manage very high volumes of data communication.

"Every time you are on a video call, stream a movie, or play an online video game, you're routing data back and forth through a data centre to be processed," said Caltech graduate student Arian Hashemi Talkhooncheh, lead author of a paper describing the two-chip innovation in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. “There are more than 2,700 data centres in the US and more than 8,000 worldwide, with towers of servers stacked on top of each other to manage the load of thousands of terabytes of data going in and out every second."

The towers of servers in data centres heat up as they work, and some facilities have been built underwater to cool them more easily. The more efficient they can be made, the less heat they will generate and the greater the volume of information they will be able to manage.