Ruonan Han seeks to thrust the limitations of electronic circuits.
Ruonan Han’s exploration is driving up the speeds of microelectronic circuits to permit new purposes in communications, sensing, and stability.
Han, an affiliate professor who a short while ago attained tenured in MIT’s Office of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science, focuses on developing semiconductors that run successfully at quite large frequencies in an effort and hard work to bridge what is known as the “terahertz gap.”
The terahertz location of the electromagnetic spectrum, which lies between microwaves and infrared mild, has mainly eluded researchers for the reason that regular electronic equipment are too gradual to manipulate terahertz waves.
Ruonan Han, affiliate professor in the Office of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science, seeks to thrust the limits of digital units so they can work successfully at terahertz frequencies. Credit rating: M. Scott Brauer
“Traditionally, terahertz has been unexplored territory for researchers merely because, frequency-intelligent, it is far too substantial for the electronics folks and too small for the photonics men and women,” he claims. “We have a large amount of constraints in the supplies and speeds of units that can achieve those people frequencies, but when you get there, a ton of wonderful factors occur.”
For occasion, terahertz frequency waves can shift through strong surfaces and create quite specific, significant-resolution images of what is inside, Han states.
Radio frequency (RF) waves can travel by way of surfaces, far too — which is the reason your Wi-Fi router can be in a distinctive place than your laptop or computer. But terahertz waves are substantially lesser than radio waves, so the devices that transmit and acquire them can be smaller, also.
Han’s group, together with his collaborator Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the University of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Laptop or computer Science, not long ago shown a terahertz frequency identification (TFID) tag that was hardly 1 sq. millimeter in dimension.
“It doesn’t need to have any external antennas, so it is basically just a piece of silicon that is super-cheap, super-little, and can continue to produce the functions that a normal RFID tag can do. Due to the fact it is so smaller, you could now tag fairly considerably any product you want and track logistics information such as the historical past of production, etcetera. We could not do this ahead of, but now it gets to be a probability,” he suggests.
Tuning in
A straightforward radio encouraged Han to pursue engineering.
As a little one in Inner Mongolia, a province that stretches alongside China’s northern border, he pored above books stuffed with circuit schematics and do-it-you strategies for earning printed circuit boards. The key university university student then taught himself to build a radio.
“I couldn’t commit a great deal into these digital parts or spend too substantially time tinkering with them, but that was wherever the seed was planted,” he says. “I didn’t know all the details of how it labored, but when I