| Posted: June 17, 2010 |
Silicon chips to enter world of high speed optical processing |
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(Nanowerk News) Physicists at the University of Sydney have brought silicon chips closer to performing all-optical computing and information processing that could overcome the speed limitations intrinsic to electronics, with the first report published of an on-chip all-optical temporal integrator in Nature Communications today.
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An all-optical integrator, or lightwave capacitor, is a fundamental building block equivalent to those used in multi-functional electronic circuits.
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Associate Professor David Moss, a senior researcher within the Institute for Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS), leads an international team which has developed the optical integrator on a CMOS compatible silicon chip.
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The device, a photonic chip compatible with electronic technology (CMOS), will be a key enabler of next generation fully-integrated ultrafast optical data processing technologies for many applications including ultra-fast optical information-processing, optical memory, measurement, computing systems, and real-time differential equation computing units.
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It is based on a passive micro-ring resonator and performs the time integral of an arbitrary optical waveform with a time resolution of a few picoseconds, corresponding to a processing speed of around 200 GHz, and with a "hold" time approaching a nanosecond.
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This represents an unprecedented processing time-bandwidth product (TBP) - a principal figure of merit, defined as the ratio between the integration time window to the fastest time feature that can be accurately processed - approaching 100 - much higher than advanced passive electronic integrators where the TBP is less than 10.
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The research has just been published in a paper entitled On-chip CMOS compatible all-optical integrator in the international journal, Nature Communications.
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Associate Professor Moss said using light for ultrahigh speed information processing, computing, and storage on a silicon chip was an important breakthrough.
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"With society's demands for even faster technology, ultrafast optical computing and signal processing are important," he said.
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"This on-chip optical integrator is a key to enabling many optical functions on a chip, including ultra high speed signal processing, computing, and optical memory.
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"This technology will ultimately provide the consumer with cheaper and faster computers."
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The device, based on high index doped silica glass, is low loss and has a high degree of manufacturability and design flexibility. This makes it an ideal ultrahigh speed optical integrator with a performance good enough not just for optical computing but for a wide range of applications including optical memory, real-time differential equation computing units, and many others.
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Associate Professor Moss is a researcher with the Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), an ARC Centre of Excellence.
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