ESE Spring Seminar – “Versatile RF Interconnects and Electronics for Extreme Environment Sensing and Communications”

Future emerging applications like extreme environment electronics, high-performance computing, space sensing, and brain-machine interfaces share a critical goal: massive bandwidth and deployment scalability. To this end, my research group is investigating energy-efficient and scalable sensing and communication techniques, emphasizing circuits, advanced packaging, and signal processing innovations for the above applications.

To begin with, I will briefly discuss technology gaps in information-carrying wiring harnesses and illustrate the new use cases of millimeter-wave dielectric fibers and short-distance wireless interconnects as alternative mediums, mainly as thermal isolating channels. Then, I will describe the challenges of hypersonic radio interference and harsh environment antenna remoting systems for the DoD and aerospace industries. I will introduce the high-temperature electronics framework as my future work to address the above challenges, focusing on high-temperature metrology and scalable signal-harnessing techniques at millimeter-wave frequencies. To show the feasibility of the new methods, I will illustrate the ceramic fiber’s capability of electromagnetic wave propagation, extreme heat tolerance, and extreme heat isolation, assisted by automatic gain-controlled millimeter-wave CMOS transceivers.

In the second part, I will discuss the need for large-scale cryogenic interconnects for future high-performance computing and demonstrate the potential adoption of wireless interconnects between cryogenic devices and room-temperature electronics. As an initiative, our lab demonstrated the feasibility of removing thermally loaded wires/connectors between 7K and 290K thermal break and efficiently packing more data in a millimeter-wave carrier enabled by multi-level signaling and digital pre-distortion in CMOS technologies. As a part of the scalable interconnect theme within high-performance computing, I will also describe my collaborative efforts with academic and industry partners on massively scalable RF connectors for future artificial intelligence and data centers.

Lastly, I will elaborate further on my research activities in space sensing and brain-machine interface, where massive scalability matters most. I will discuss their challenges, opportunities, and future directions.