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 Posted: Fri 21:52, 02 Aug 2013 Post subject: Metatronic chip replaces electricity with light |
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Metatronic chip replaces electricity with light
Optical engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have created the first computer circuit where logic is performed with light instead of electricity. Dubbed this lightbased logic could enable smaller, faster,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and more energy efficient computer chips.
The team, led by Nader Engheta, demonstrated that it possible to make resistors,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], inductors, and capacitors that act on light. By creating a chip that has a comblike array of nanorods tiny pillars of silicon nitride (pictured below) the flow of light can be controlled in such a way that the and of the optical signal can be altered. By changing the height and width of the nanorods, and by altering their arrangement,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], different effects can be achieved. For example, if light has to pass by a short rod and then a tall rod, it might create a resistorlike effect but a square of four short rods might act as an optical capacitor. The metatronic name comes from the fact that these nanorods are a metamaterial; a material that has has properties that can be found in nature.
Because Engheta and co are working with light instead of electricity, their metatronic chip has some very odd properties. For example,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], light polarization whether the light wave undulates left/right or up/down affects how it moves through the nanorods. When the light is aligned with the nanorods (pictured above), the circuit fires in parallel; but when light is perpendicular, the circuit is serial. Eventually and be careful, this might make your brain explode you could even build 3D arrays of nanorods, where a single arrangement could act as dozens of different circuits.
To put this into perspective, imagine a lowpower, ultrahighspeed CPU that turns into a GPU when you change the input signal that the kind of functionality that metatronic circuits might one day enable. In the short term,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], though,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], work needs to be done on optical interconnects and, as yet, the closest we come to creating an optical transistor is MIT optical diode. In the short term it is much more likely that optoelectronic chips chips that mix electronic logic with optical interconnects, and which can be built using standard semiconductor processes will be used commercially.
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