Scientists create chip that uses sound waves to encode data

Chips have always been elements that require electricity to drive their operation, but over time the photonic chipswhich perform their function from light.

However, a team of Harvard scientists appears to have gone further, creating a new kind of chip that uses sound waves to transmit data.

For this, a modulator created from lithium niobatethis being a material characterized by its elasticity, which is modified in front of an electric field and generates acoustic waves.

Taking this into account, if a careful manipulation of that field is carried out, it is possible control phase, amplitude and frequency of the sound waves through the modulator, so that they can then encrypt the data generated from these elements before sending it through the waveguides.

In this sense, the team pointed out the potential benefits of acoustic wave chips, highlighting among these their ease to be installed in the tiny structures that shape waveguides, their ability not to interfere with each other Y maintain high interaction with the rest of the system components where they are implemented. In this regard, Marko Loncar, the main author of the study expressed the following:

Acoustic waves hold promise as on-chip information carriers for both quantum and classical information processing, but the development of acoustic integrated circuits has been hampered by the inability to control acoustic waves in a scalable and reliable way. with few losses […] in this work we demonstrate that we can control acoustic waves in a lithium niobate integrated platform, which brings us a little closer to an integrated acoustic circuit.

Following the achievement of this acoustic chip the team is now devoting their time to construction of more complex acoustic wave circuits, as well as trying to find a way to connect these to superconducting qubits and other components present in quantum computers.

Learn more at nature.com.