Investigate whether emerging interconnect technologies can improve future personal or connected compute systems under realistic cost and power limits.
Not open yet: Research program
This work starts when that stage arrives, so there is no application to submit today and we will not pretend otherwise. What is written below is what the role is for and what would make somebody right for it, published early on purpose so you can decide whether it is worth watching.
The work
Evaluate optical links or other advanced interconnect approaches against electrical baselines. Study packaging, conversion overhead, reliability and manufacturability with specialist partners. Keep the research tied to a measured bottleneck and a plausible product-scale use case.
The milestone
In your first 90 days, deliver a literature-grounded feasibility study and a bounded experiment with explicit performance and commercialization assumptions.
Evidence
Bring research expertise in photonics, high-speed interconnects, applied physics or related engineering. Strong experimental judgment and an ability to explain physical limits are essential.
Evidence, not credentials. We are describing work you can point at, in whatever form it exists.
The exercise
Compare an optical and electrical link for a concrete workload, including all conversion, packaging, energy and validation costs.