Prof. Dr. Michael Möller

SHIFT Sustainable Technologies Enabling Future Telecom Applications

The SHIFT Project aims to make important contributions to the two aspects of the European "twin transition" strategy, i.e. green and digital. The "digital" transition that concerns all economic and social sectors, will lead to a considerable growth in data exchange and storage, and could have a major impact on the "green" transition through the energy consumption of the telecommunication networks and data storage centers. Therefore, innovative solutions and breakthroughs in energy efficiency must be developed to prevent digitization from having negative impacts on energy consumption and global warming.

The SHIFT project aims to make important contributions on the two aspects of the "twin transition", through innovations in component and system technologies for advanced telecommunications. SHIFT will develop innovative semiconductor and packaging technologies and their validation with demonstrators for telecommunication areas such as 5GNR (Beyond 5G) and 6G wireless network access and backhaul, ultrahigh speed optical links between servers, satellite telecommunications and Earth observation. SHIFT will also contribute to environmental and societal concerns, with analysis of the life cycle of telecommunications products, through their manufacturing chain, their operational use and their recycling. Furthermore, the SHIFT project wants to respond to Europe's will for sovereignty in semiconductors, by accelerating the development and dissemination of new European technologies and by enabling many young engineers and researchers to train and develop their skills on these technologies.

Saarland University contributes to these goals by introducing a novel concept of analog multiplexing to combine the output data-rates of the digital-to-analog converters in the existing highspeed data-transport infrastructure. Thereby, the existing optical links inside and between data-centers can be kept, saving energy and material, while the data-rates of the links can be significantly increased. The analog multiplexer will be designed by the Electronics and Circuits group of Prof. Michael Möller, whose research is focused on the design of integrated high-speed circuits that operate at the feasibility limit of the underlying technology. This meets exactly the challenge of the analog-multiplexer design in SHIFT. In particular, the team aims to develop an analog multiplexer with an 8-bit resolution that pushes the state-of-the-art by almost 70% to a record sampling rate of 200 GS/s.