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GUEST EDITORIAL
APPLICATIONS OF NANONTECHNOLOGIES IN COMMUNICATIONS
Dilip Krishnaswamy
T
Amr Helmy
he nanotechnology area is a new and rapidly developing research domain that is expected to radically transform communications and computing for the future. The field of nanotechnologies has exploded with opportunities and promise in recent years. The domains where this paradigm has benefitted vary from medicine to space and industrial applications. Nanotechnology as a field attempts to harness effects and functionality that take place in materials and structures incorporating nano-scale features, which can be tuned at will. The field is extremely multidisciplinary as the control over tuning the performance can be achieved by physical, electronic, chemical, and biochemical means. Having been utilized as early as medieval times with the use of gold nanoparticles in the materials used for colored glass at the time, nanotechnology has seen a surge in interest and activity in recent decades. This may be due to numerous reasons, the most important of which is the enhanced ability to control and characterize materials and structures on the nanometer scale with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy. In spite of the successes achieved by nanotechnology research, major challenges still lie ahead. Issues such as device performance sensitivity, fabrication techniques that lend themselves to manufacturing large-scale integrated circuits, and fabrication process robustness have to be sorted out before the field is successfully utilized in industrial settings. Research at the nano-scale is typically in a range of 1 to 100 nm. Materials at the nano-scale can have different electrical, optical, and magnetic properties that can result in new applications. Performance and power characteristics of circuits at the nano-scale can also lead to new applications. As technologies rapidly evolve into the nano-scale, several challenges are anticipated regarding the successful creation, utilization, and deployment of nanotechnology-based solutions in the communications area. Key areas for communications-related research include but are not limited to interconnects for communication networks, interconnects for 3D die stacking, sensor design, photonic applications, nonlinear design applications, radio frequency (RF) design using nano-materials/nanometer complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS), wireless networking, nano-energy generation, energy scavenging, electronic brain design, molecular techniques in medical/biological applications, and applications of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) for communications. This feature topic addresses just a small subset of the vast and diverse scope of emerging topics that relate to the applications of nanotechnologies in communications. The first article is titled “Nanoscale Materials and Devices
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for Future Communication Networks,” by M. Saif Islam and Logeeswaran VJ. This article presents an overview of current research related to nano-materials for future computing and communications designs, nano-photonics-based interconnects, and nanomaterials-based sensors. It discusses interesting research topics such as memristors, DNA electronics, carbonbased nanomaterials, nanomagnetics, and nano-scale quantum dots. The second article is titled “Applications of Graphene Devices in RF Communications,” by Tomás Palacios, Allen Hsu, and Han Wang. It introduces graphene (a one-atomthick layer of carbon atoms), discusses graphene properties, growth techniques for synthesis, key issues for fabrication, properties of graphene ambipolar transistors, and applications such as the design of graphene resonators, RF switches, and low noise amplifiers. The third and final article is titled “Carbon Nanotube-Based Nanoscale Ad Hoc Networks,” by Baris Atakan and Ozgur B. Akan. It suggests ad hoc networks based on CNT-based nano-communication systems, addressing design challenges associated with nanotransceiver design along with power, processing, and memory constraints. It addresses wireless communication challenges in such networks, deployment and reliability issues, and options for medium access control design in these networks. We hope that these articles provide a compressive sampling of the opportunities and challenges related to the application of nanotechnologies in communications. We would like to thank the authors and reviewers for their contributions to this feature topic. We would also like to thank Steve Gorshe and Nim Cheung for their kind encouragement to present this topic to the readers of IEEE Communications Magazine. We hope that future issues of the magazine will provide insight into additional applications, and hope that the articles in this issue stimulate the reader to actively participate in this exciting new area of research.
BIOGRAPHIES DILIP KRISHNASWAMY (
[email protected]) is a senior staff researcher in the office of the chief scientist at the Qualcomm Research Center in San Diego, California. He received his B.Tech. degree in electronics and communication engineering in 1991 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, his M.S. degree in computer science in 1993 from Syracuse University where he was a University Fellow, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1997 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the best paper award for the 1997 IEEE VLSI Test Symposium. He was a platform architect in the Mobility Group at Intel Corporation. At Intel, he worked on various projects including the Pentium4 processor development, system-on-chip mobile platform architectures, and cross-layer wireless multimedia optimizations in the digital home. He was the architect
IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2010
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GUEST EDITORIAL for Intel's first system-on-chip heterogeneous multicore cellular/applications processor (PXA800F). He taught courses related to parallel computer architecture, and digital systems design, at the University of California, Davis. He is on the Industrial Board of Advisors for the ECE Department at the University of California, Davis. He is Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Emerging Technology Subcommittee on Applications of Nanotechnologies in Communications. He is also Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Wireless Communications. His current research interests include heterogeneous wireless communications, nano-interconnects, 3D system architectures, parallel processing, distributed cooperative processing, and network economics. AMR HELMY (
[email protected]) is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada. Prior to his academic career, he held a position at Agilent Technologies’ photonic devices, R&D division in the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2004. There his responsibilities included developing distributed feedback lasers, monolithically integrated lasers, and modulators and amplifiers in InP-based semiconductors. He also developed high-powered submarineclass 980 nm InGaAs pump lasers. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, with a focus on photonic fabrication technologies in 1999 and 1994, respectively. He received his B.Sc. from Cairo University in 1993, in electronics and telecommunications engineer-
ing. For his graduate studies he was awarded the Francis Morrison Award form the University of Glasgow. In 2007 he was awarded an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research and Innovation, Ontario, Canada for his leading work on nonlinear frequency conversion in III-V semiconductors. His research interests include photonic device physics and characterization techniques, with emphasis on nonlinear optics in III-V semiconductors; applied optical spectroscopy in III-V optoelectronic devices and materials; and III-V fabrication and monolithic integration techniques. DAVID D. WENTZLOFF [M] (
[email protected]) received his B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. In summer 2004 he worked in the Portland Technology Development group at Intel, Hillsboro, Oregon. Since August 2007 he has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is currently an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sscience. He is the recipient of the 2002 MIT Masterworks Award, 2004 Analog Devices Distinguished Scholar Award, 2009 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and 2009–2010 Eta Kappa Nu Professor of the Year Award. He has served on the technical program committee for ICUWB 2008–2010. He is a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems, Microwave Theory and Techniques, and Solid-State Circuits Societies, and Tau Beta Pi.
CALL FOR PAPERS
BROADBAND ACCESS SERIES Not so long ago, each of the major telecommunications networks (switched telephony, data transmission, cable television, and wireless networks) was evolving in order to more effectively support that network’s legacy services. However, growing pressure to provide multimedia services, the explosive growth of the Internet, and a progressive deregulation of the telecommunications market have changed the landscape. In order to meet the increasing demands of their legacy services and to position themselves for new services, each of these networks has moved to a fiber-optic broadband backbone network. A bottleneck remains, however, in the subscriber access portion of the network; the "last mile." Telephone networks provide ubiquitous, efficient two-connections to homes and businesses, but are limited by the bandwidth that can be obtained through twisted pair cables. CATV operators, on the other hand, deliver huge bandwidth in the downstream direction to our homes but suffer from a limited bandwidth and infrastructure for supporting an upstream return channel. CATV operators have also traditionally lacked connectivity to businesses. Wireless service providers suffer from limited spectrum availability and the various signal propagation constraints. Data service providers have typically relied on one of the other networks to provide the last-mile connection. In recent years, different access technologies were brought into existence in order to provide the last mile with an increased bandwidth and a two-way connectivity. Telecom operators are lobbying for both xDSL technologies that expand the bandwidth of the existing copper plant up to several tens of Mbps and FITL solutions that allow for an efficient sharing of access fibers by residential customers. CATV operators are not lagging behind and are installing a return communication channel in a low-frequency part of a coax bandwidth. Two other relative newcomers to the multimedia market -- wireless solutions and digital satellites -- offer important benefits such as rapid deployment and are thus not to be ignored. It is an easy guess that they will also serve some part of the multimedia cake. While the current economic condition in the telecommunications industry creates pressure to minimize capital spending on broadband infrastructure on one hand, on the other hand it also creates a greater urgency to deploy new, revenue-generating services such as high-speed data interconnectivity. The Broadband Access series addresses a full spectrum of issues related to a residential access - from signal level, through network architectures together with their life cycle costs up to live trial descriptions. We encourage experts in these areas to share their knowledge with the readership of the IEEE Communications Magazine. We are going to publish reviewed submission relevant to broadband access three times per year (months to be set by the Chief Editor). The papers should be prepared according to the author's guidelines (available at http://www.comsoc.org/~ci/). Manuscripts must be submitted through the magazine's submissions Web site at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/commag-ieee. You will need to register and then proceed to the author center. On the manuscript details page, please select Broadband Access Series from the drop-down menu.
SERIES EDITORS Steve Gorshe PMC-Sierra, Inc. Dept. Telecommunications Portland, OR U.S.A.
[email protected]
IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2010
Zdzislaw PAPIR AGH University of Technology Cracow, Poland
[email protected]
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