Background
Internet traffic is experiencing explosive growth. As a result, the fiber-optic communication systems, on which the Internet is based, will use a fifth of all the world’s electricity by 2030.
This is not sustainable.
Immediate actions are urgently needed to make future fiber-optic communication systems as power-efficient as possible. The ultimate limit of the minimum required power to transmit and recover the information is set by the amount of internal or fundamental noise associated with the transmitter and the receiver.
Vision
Zibar’s vision with the grant from Villum Fonden is to build a world-class inter-disciplinary research environment that will use artificial intelligence to realize the transmitter and the receiver that exhibit the minimum amount of permissible noise, and find the most power-efficient approach for information transport over the fiber-optic networks.
AI excels at solving problems that are highly complex. Currently, we don’t know the fundamental limits on how energy-efficient fiber-optic communication can be made. There is therefore huge potential in applying AI to solve this highly relevant societal problem.
Zibar’s aim with the project? Fiber-optic communication systems that approach the fundamental lower bound on energy consumption.
Villum Investigator
“The Villum Investigator programme gives researchers the time and funding their ideas deserve. Giving researchers the freedom to pursue their curiosity is crucial for attracting some of the world’s top talents to Danish universities, where they can make valuable contributions to research and society with their groundbreaking knowledge,” says Jens Kann-Rasmussen, chair of Villum Fonden’s board
The Villum Investigator programme provides grants of up to DKK 40 million to experienced and internationally renowned researchers, who have conducted international, groundbreaking research for 10 years or more, and want to continue spearheading world-class research.
