Starting Grant for UPC researcher Sergi Abadal to develop a new generation of faster and more efficient processors with wireless communication systems and quantum computing
Professor and researcher Sergi Abadal, from the UPC’s Department of Computer Architecture, has won a European Research Council Starting Grant to study new ways to build faster and more efficient processors, based on wireless communications, massively parallel processing, specialised accelerators and disruptive technologies such as quantum computing.
Apr 19, 2022
Computer systems have become an integral part of our daily lives and have changed the way we learn, work and communicate. Their future development is closely linked to the improvements offered by the new generations of processors at the heart of these systems.
A common feature of today’s computer systems is that internal data communication has become a fundamental limitation. The exponential increase in the amount and variability of data transfers within computer systems makes traditional interconnections insufficient and threatens to stop technological progress unless fast and versatile communication alternatives for computer processors are developed.
The advances in processor design over the last 40 years, based on the miniaturisation of transistors to improve speed and efficiency, are now reaching the limit and new performance optimisation approaches are required. Experts thus claim that chip internal communication systems are becoming increasingly important. The expected demise of Moore’s Law—which over the last decades predicted that the complexity of integrated circuits would double annually and that prices and manufacturing costs would decrease—has led informatics and computer architecture engineers to study new ways to build faster processors, based on massively parallel processing (which performs millions of computations simultaneously), the design of specialised accelerators and the application of disruptive technologies such as quantum computing.
Towards a new era of processors
In this context, researcher Sergi Abadal, from the Department of Computer Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), who is linked to the Barcelona School of Telecommunications (ETSETB) and the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB), is leading the project WINC (Wireless Networks within Next-Generation Computing Systems), which is expected to revolutionise computer architecture. With a cross-disciplinary approach, WINC will test and validate the integration of wireless networks into computer systems, explore their fundamental limits and develop new types of antennas and protocols. This ground-breaking approach to communication paves the way to designing radically new computer architectures by using wireless terahertz technology and also integrating quantum bits into processors. These technologies will increase at least 10 times the speed, efficiency and scalability of computer systems.
WINC will thus be the seed of a new generation of quantum and non-quantum processors, which will be the cornerstone of computing evolution over the coming decades. The project led by Abadal has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros to be developed over the next five years and is expected to produce results in a couple of years.
