A revolution in computing?
Thursday 23 December 2010
Silicon Photonics has the potential to revolutionise a range of applications including optical interconnects, future generations of supercomputers, fibre-to-the-home, environmental sensing, security and military applications.
A crucial component for the next generation of supercomputers and high speed internet that will come to our homes is the optical modulator. This device encodes fast electronic signals onto a beam of infrared light.
A special invited article on this buoyant field was presented in Nature Photonics by Graham Reed, Goran Mashanovich, Frederic Gardes and David Thomson from the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI), University of Surrey.
“Silicon is the dominant material in microelectronics. It is low cost, thoroughly understood, and it is straightforward to apply mass-production techniques,” explains Professor Graham Reed, Head of the Silicon Photonics Group at the ATI.
“With photonic functions integrated on silicon, we can get much faster data processing at low cost. Our group initiated work on optical modulators in the early 1990s. Due to the extensive research effort of several groups around the world, including Surrey, the bandwidth of optical modulators in silicon has been improved dramatically in recent years, into the multi-Gigahertz regime. Our paper in Nature Photonics discusses these techniques that are used to implement silicon optical modulators for next generation computing.”
Dr Goran Mashanovich, a Royal Society Research Fellow, says: “Our group has been active in this field for more than 15 years and work currently being performed is funded by EPSRC, EU, and the Royal Society. We have made significant progress and believe that our optical modulator designs are currently among the very best in the world. We hope to report the details early next year.”
Professor Ravi Silva, Director of the ATI adds: “Optical technology is poised to revolutionise short-reach interconnects and silicon photonics is a leading contender. The research conducted at the ATI is at the forefront of technology in optical modulation in silicon. We are excited about the progress made at the ATI and look forward to its impact on everyday life and society. .”
Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v4/n8/abs/nphoton.2010.179.html
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