“The goal is to make all these parts work together effectively on a single platform, which would greatly reduce the loss of signals and remove the need for extra technology,” said Quinlan. “Phase one of this project was to show that all these individual pieces work together. Phase two is putting them together on the chip,” he added.
A team of researchers from several prestigious institutions helped NIST with this amazing achievement. These included the University of Colorado Boulder, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Virginia, and Yale University.
“I like to compare our research to a construction project. There are a lot of moving parts, and you need to make sure everyone is coordinated so the plumber and electrician show up at the right time in the project,” said Quinlan. We all work together really well to keep things moving forward,” he added.