SystemX

Since the very beginning, X (formerly Google X) has had a single mission: to invent and launch "moonshot" technologies — like energy kites, balloon-powered internet, all-electric deliver drones, and self-driving cars — that we think could make the world a radically better place. Our "Rapid Evaluation" team, led by Phil Watson, is responsible for identifying, investigating, and evaluating these potential moonshots. In this talk, Phil will share what he's learned about finding and shaping promising new moonshots along their journey from outlandish, high-risk ideas into projects that just might have a shot at making it into the real world — and making a difference in the big picture challenges facing society.

What makes a successful engineering team? Why makes a fun engineering team? How can the two be combined? Following the adventures (and misadventures) of the the Stanford team competing in the University Rover Challenge, the talk will cover how to go about starting a multi person design project, how testing can be approached and we delve into some of the technical details of the two robots.

SystemX November Conference - Nov. 19-21, 2019

***Preliminary session lineup - please check the SystemX calendar for event details.

Quantum transduction is the manipulation coherent quantum states at the boundaries of quantum systems, and it lies at the heart of engineering these "systems" into networks, sensors or computers. Coherent transduction of quantum states between microwave and optical frequencies is an essential component of many emerging quantum information science (QIS) applications, as it provides an effective way for linking the classical and quantum world or transporting information on macroscopic scales. The performance of quantum systems that require microwave-optical transduction in practical applications will be determined by the achievable data rates and fidelity in transferring quantum information between these two extreme wavelengths. Unfortunately, direct transduction from microwave to optical frequencies is inherently dissipative, leading to thermal losses which limit the achievable performance of microwave quantum sensors and circuits operating at millikelvin (mK) temperatures. To overcome this limitation, a fundamentally new approach is needed.

Rather than direct transduction to optical frequencies, we are utilizing the mm-wave regime as an intermediate state in a two-step transduction scheme. Our "quantum bus" would perform the microwave to mm-wave transduction with a superconducting resonator at mK temperatures before transporting the photon and its quantum information to higher temperatures and potentially being up-converted into the optical range. Converting to mm-wave frequencies can be achieved with much lower dissipation, and even at these intermediate photon energies coherence can be maintained at elevated temperatures. While optical links are the best solution for long-range massively-parallel networks, low-loss mm-wave photonics would also allow preservation of quantum information at room temperature for a simpler network at laboratory scales.

Rapid miniaturization of electronic devices, driven in recent years by the emergence of smartphones, has made many of the key components needed onboard aerospace systems available in very small, low-cost, and light-weight packages. This trend is behind the growing popularity of small consumer “drones,” as well as the recent emergence of the “ChipSat” concept – centimeter-scale spacecraft built with the same parts and processes used in the consumer electronics industry. This talk will focus on pushing the limits of size, mass, and capability in space systems. I will discuss the technical challenges associated with building and flying satellites at this size scale, along with several ongoing flight projects, including the crowd-funded KickSat missions to deploy over one hundred Sprite spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. I will also share some recent work on the Breakthrough Starshot project, which has the goal of sending small spacecraft to our nearest neighboring stars in the coming decades.

Integrated electronic-photonic co-design can profoundly impact both fields resulting in advances in several areas such as energy efficient communication, signal processing, imaging, and sensing. Examples of integrated electronic-photonic co-design may be categorized into two groups: (a) electronic assisted photonics, where integrated analog, RF, mm-wave, and THz circuits are employed to improve the performance of photonic systems, and (b) photonic assisted electronics, where photonic systems and devices are used to improve the performance of integrated RF, mm-wave, and THz systems. In this talk, examples of electronic-photonic co-design such optical synthesis and low power laser stabilization and laser linewidth reduction will be presented.

Buildings account for the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at 32% of the total, followed by industry at 30%, transportation at 29%, and agriculture at 9%. Clearly, any program to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions must include buildings. This talk will explore the opportunities and challenges to greatly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector, using as a case study a recent solar retrofit of an existing house that rendered it "zero-carbon." Implications for the future of the utility system will be discussed.

Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), first deployed in 2015, provides services today for more than one billion people and provides more than an order of magnitude improvement in performance and performance/W compared to contemporary platforms. Inspired by the success of the first TPU for neural network inference, Google developed multiple generations of machine learning supercomputers for neural network training that allow near linear scaling of ML workloads running on TPUv2 and TPUv3 processors. TPUs extend research frontiers and benefit a growing number of Google services.

By the end of 1990 the Acorn RISC Machine, which was designed in Britain, was practically extinct. The parent company, Acorn, was down a very dark financial alley, and the remnants of the design team were cast out to fend for themselves, equipped with about 18 months of financial rations from Apple, and a really rather odd microprocessor design. When Dave Jaggar joined ARM a few months later, with the ink not quite dry on his Master's Thesis, he thought perhaps he'd made a dreadful mistake. However, after twelve months he was given free range to start the ARM architecture afresh, and the new Advanced RISC Machine, as the company was now named, was born. Over the next 8 years he worked out a little bit about computer architecture, in the same way that a 17th century surgeon understands anatomy, then he was made the first ARM Fellow, so he promptly retired back to New Zealand to raise his children. As it's the 25th anniversary of his quite successful Thumb compressed instruction set, and his children have all left home, he's been told it's about time he explained himself.

The current electronics industry has been completely dominated by Si-based devices due to its exceptionally low materials cost. However, demand for non-Si electronics is becoming substantially high because current/next generation electronics requires novel functionalities that can never be achieved by Si-based materials. Unfortunately, the extremely high cost of non-Si semiconductor materials prohibits the progress in this field. Recently our team has invented a new crystalline growth concept, termed as "remote epitaxy", which can copy/paste crystalline information of the wafer remotely through graphene, thus generating single-crystalline films on graphene [1,2]. These single-crystalline films are easily released from the slippery graphene surface and the graphene-coated substrates can be infinitely reused to generate single-crystalline films. Thus, the remote epitaxy technique can cost-efficiently produce freestanding single-crystalline films. This allows unprecedented functionality of flexible device functionality required for current ubiquitous electronics. In addition, we have recently demonstrated a manufacturing method to manipulate wafer-scale 2D materials with atomic precision to form monolayer-by-monolayer stacks of wafer-scale 2D material heterostructures [3]. In this talk, I will discuss the implication of this new technology for revolutionary design of next generation electronic/photonic devices with combination of 3D/2D materials.

Lastly, I will discuss about an ultimate alternative computing solution that does not follow the conventional von Neuman method. As Moore's law approaches its physical limits, brain-inspired neuromorphic computing has recently emerged as a promising alternative because of its compatibility with AI. In the neuromorphic computing system, resistive random access memory (RRAM) can be used as an artificial synapse for weight elements in neural network algorithms. RRAM typically utilizes a defective amorphous solid as a switching medium. However, due to the random nature of amorphous phase, it has been challenging to precisely control weights in artificial synapses, thus resulting in poor learning accuracy. Our team recently demonstrated single-crystalline-based artificial synapses that show precise control of synaptic weights, promising superior online learning accuracy of 95.1% – a key step paving the way towards post von Neumann computing [4]. I will discuss about how we design the materials and devices for this new neuromorphic hardware.