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54 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2019 also love to have Rick Hartley come and do a two-day class for us in the future. There are many other opportunities for learning and networking that will be coming up in 2019. We really hope to have more people— current designers, engineers, manufacturers, software vendors, and those interested in PCB design—come join us. This area has so much potential! Visit cascade-ipcdc.org for more information on our chapter and upcoming events. Note: Dates and locations are subject to change. Contact EPTAC Corporation to check current dates and availability. A minimum enrollment of seven students is required for a class to be held. Upcoming Events IPC APEX EXPO 2019 • January 26–31: Meetings and courses • January 29–31: Conference and exhibition • January 31–February 2: IPC Designer Certification CID/CID+ San Diego, California ipcapexexpo.org DesignCon 2019 • January 29–31 Santa Clara, California designcon.com References 1. IPC Designers Council Cascade Chapter, "Previous Meetings," 2016–2018. Stephen Chavez is a member of the IPC Designers Council Executive Board and chairman of the communications subcommittee. To read past columns or contact Chavez, click here. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new integrated photonics platform that can store light and electrically control its frequency (or color) in an integrated circuit. Microwave signals are ubiquitous in wireless com- munications, but researchers thought they interact too weakly with photons. That was before SEAS researchers, led by Marko Loncar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, developed a technique to fabricate high-performance optical microstructures using lithium niobate, a material with powerful electro-optic properties. Loncar and his team pre- viously demonstrated that they can propagate light through lithium niobate nano- waveguides with very little loss and control light intensity with on-chip lithium niobate m o d u l a to rs . I n t h e l a te s t research, they combined and further developed these tech- nologies to build a molecule-like system and used this new platform to precisely control the frequency and phase of light on a chip. Next, the researchers aim to develop even lower-loss optical waveguides and microwave circuits using the same architecture to enable even higher efficiencies and, ultimately, achieve a quantum link between microwave and optical photons. "The energies of microwave and optical photons differ by five orders of magnitude, but our system could possibly bridge this gap with almost 100 percent efficiency, one photon at a time," said Loncar, senior author of the paper. "This would enable the realization of a quantum cloud—a dis- tributed network of quantum computers connected via secure optical communication channels." (Source: Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) Programming Light on a Chip