The future of digital computing and communications will involve both electronics—manipulating data with electricity—and photonics, or doing the same with light. Together the two could allow exponentially more data traffic across the globe in a process that is also more energy efficient.

“The bottom line is that integrating photonics with electronics in the same package is the transistor for the 21st century. If we can’t figure out how to do that, then we’re not going to be able to scale forward,” says Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and director of the MIT Microphotonics Center.

Enter FUTUR-IC, a new research team based at MIT. “Our goal is to build a microchip industry value chain that is resource-efficient,” says Anu Agarwal, head of FUTUR-IC and a principal research scientist at the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL).