Silicon Photonics – The Future of Computer Industry

Chips are moving more and more data around, making metallic writing on and between them won’t be able to fuss thus our future computer industry might not be able to attain our demands of total efficiency.  With this in mind our future computing may need a light touch factually.

Researchers are in the verge to solution it and are faced to variety of issues such as cost reduction and finding ways to flabbergasted basic material downside. As of now researchers are now on the approach of using silicon photonics to save computer industry.
This new found technology employs silicon as optical material, and if found compatible to the CMOS semiconductor processing, silicon photonics is the answer to low-cost optical devices, easy integration and fast data transfer, though problems aroused such as the fact that silicon doesn’t emit light and is an indirect bandgap material according to a leading researcher of this field and a professor of electrical and engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, John Bowers. Thinking outside the box, another possibility would be to produce the light off chip and use silicon only for modulation, routing and detection in case incorporating more emission efficient III-V semiconductor compounds such as indium phosphide or indium gallium arsenide fails.

Companies are now putting silicon photonics to work and future computer communication will likely to travel over fiber, using transceivers to translate from photons to electrons and back.  Doing so would countenance servers to converse to each other over fiber and solve some data center bandwidth, thermal and cost problems. `Another silicon photonics tactic comes from privately held Luxtera Inc., of Carlsbad, Calif. Their view point is to route protons on a CMOS chip using CMOS manufacturing process. The fact that silicon could not emit light but could absorb it in the visible and near infrared ranges is an implication that silicon photonics can be done. Luxtera uses 1490nm lasers which are surface-coupled into waveguides. Silicon modulators can clasp the beam on and off 10 billion times per second as these waveguides send light into it. The said silicon photonics technology consumes less of about one tenth of other optical technologies however the company’s silicon photonics technique uses less than one-third the power of an electrical approach.

Until now the research continues on silicon photonics . According to Beausoleil who noted a number of challenges in chip-scale silicon photonics, it is still to be decided on whether to put light source on the chip or to bring it in. Currently, chips are two-dimensional, but interconnect needs are forcing the industry into 3 dimensional. Solutions had been think of in which the manager of silicon integrated nanophotonics Yuri Vlasov investigated and noted that implementing such thing creates numerous hurdles knowing that as the chip runs it generates heat  causing to temperature rise and take note that this rise isn’t stable. Designing optical components to handle such heat swings will be a challenge, especially given that the device must be compact, low cost, low in power usage and CMOS compatible.

Although Vlasov doesn’t expect on chip silicon photonics to appear soon and believes that we have all the building blocks and the next step is to how to put it all together.