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Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Switch controls light on a nanoscale for faster information processing




Researchers at Purdue University have helped to develop a compact switch that captures small chip components more securely to speed up information processing.

It is known that photons or light units are faster than electrons, so that information can be processed faster by smaller chip structures. University of Zurich and the ETH, researchers at Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, designed a switch to bypass the use of so-called surface plasmons or optically with the light absorption tendency of the free oscillations of the electron cloud did not want to limit light at nanoscale level.

"There is an important idea behind this is that from the electronic circuit to photonic circuits," Distinguished Professor of Bob and Anne Burnett Purdue Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering Vladimir Salad Aliyev said. "From electronics to photonics you need structures that confine the light to very small areas: plasmon seems to be the solution."

Although plasmons reduce light, photons are lost or absorbed rather than being transferred to other parts of the computer chip when they interact with the plasma.

In a study on April 26, researchers released this problem by developing a switch called a ring modulator, a resonance of the switch to check if the light is coupled to the plasma. At resonance or resonance, light passes through the silicon waveguide to other parts of the chip. When it is off or resonant, the light is coupled to the plasmons and absorbed.

Research Associate Institute of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Purdue University Soham researchers, said: "If you have a pure plasma stimulation device, the light may be harmful, but in this case, which is an advantage for us, because it can reduce the signal, if needed. "The idea is to choose when you want to fail and when you do not want to."

This loss is contrasted between the on and off states to better control the direction of illumination, and is suitable for processing information bits. The mechanism supported by the plasma ring modulator would also result in a smaller "footprint," such as light confinement plasmon in a nano-chip configuration, Shalaev said.

Researchers from Purdue University want to perform such a modulator and a complementary metal oxide semiconductor transistor is compatible, paving the way for a true hybrid photonics and nano-electronic circuits of computer chips.

"Supercomputers already contain electronic and optical components that are capable of large-scale computing very quickly," according to Professor Purdue Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose laboratory specializes in plasmonics materials Alexandra Boltasseva said. "What we study is very well suited for this hybrid mode, so we do not have to wait for the computer chip to use everything visually."

plasma-assisted development of electro-optical modulator requires technical know-how not only in the plasma, but also Juerg Leuthold leadership team of ETH Zurich (including Christian Haffner and other members of the group) integrated circuits and nano-photonics, as well as material from the photoelectric Larry Dalton Group the Washington University. Hafner and Nathaniel Kinsey, a former student at Purdue, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Leuthold, Shalaev, and Boltasseva, developed a low-loss type of subambient optical plasma based on the idea-assisted electro-optic modulator, incorporating a compact chip Recognition and communication technology.

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