Ravi Pradip's CoreDAQ Drops the Barrier to Entry for Silicon Photonics Experimentation

Self-described "aspiring physicist" at the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics Ravi Pradip has opened sales for a device he hopes will help reduce the barrier to entry for photonic chip development and testing: the CoreDAQ opto-electronic data acquisition system.

"I built CoreDAQ to make photonic chip testing practical and affordable," Pradip explains of the compact device. "Most lab instruments are bulky, expensive, or need extra hardware just to start measuring. CoreDAQ changes that — it's a modern, USB [Type]-C powered, four-channel opto-electronic data acquisition system with no external supplies, batteries, or driver headaches. It runs over high-speed USB with a deep buffer for fast, synchronized measurements. Especially designed for on-chip and off-chip photonic component characterization, CoreDAQ brings lab-grade performance to your desk."

With Moore's Law — the observation turned must-hit target from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a leading-edge integrated circuit trends towards a doubling every two years — running up against physical barriers to shrinking feature sizes, the semiconductor industry is investigating a variety of paths forward. One is silicon photonics: the use of light, rather than electrical signals, within the chip. It's a proven technology for communication already, but may one day drive practical processors themselves — devices, it's hoped, capable of running many times faster than current electrical chips while drawing less power and outputting less heat.

Experimenting with silicon photonics can be an expensive business, but Pradip's hoping to make things a little more accessible piece-by-piece — starting with the CoreDAQ. Based on indium-gallium-arsenide (InGaAs) wide-area sensors, the CoreDAQ is a data acquisition box for optical, rather than electrical, signals. Its specifications promise an 800–1,700nm spectral range, 100pW noise floor, 0.2dB uncertainty, and a 5mW optical saturation power — with a 20mW threshold before the sensor is expected to take damage.

The box itself, connected to a host via USB Type-C with no need for any additional hardware, comes with four channels capable of 16-bit sampling at a user-defined rate of between 1Hz and 50kHz. Inside is an STMicroelectronics STM32 microcontroller and an Analog Devices AD7606 data acquisition system chip, with 32MB of on-board memory. Pradip promises both a user-facing software package and a Python application programming interface (API) for programmatic use.

Pricing is considerably lower than equivalent existing products, but eager buyers will still need to temper their expectations: Pradip has listed the CoreDAQ on Tindie at $2,299 including 15V 2A power supply, though at the time of writing had only shared rendered imagery — and further warns that the gadget is "an experimental research instrument, intended solely for laboratory and development use by qualified individuals" and supplied "without warranties of any kind, express or implied." A spec sheet and the Python API source plus application samples are available on GitHub under an unspecified license.