| Posted: December 20, 2007 |
One of the smallest optical switches ever |
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(Nanowerk News) A team of researchers at the University of St. Andrews has developed one of the smallest optical switches ever made.
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The technology may eventually be used in small consumer devices that connect every home or office to an optical fibre and supply high data rates, including television on demand.
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| Optical switch compared to a human hair (Image: University of St. Andrews)
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The researchers, based at the School of Physics and Astronomy and led by Professor Thomas Krauss, have used photonic crystal technology to reduce the size of the switch to only a few wavelengths of light. Consequently, the entire switch is only about one tenth of the size of a human hair.
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Professor Krauss explained, "The switch is aimed at applications in telecommunications where we foresee its use in routing of optical signals.
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"The idea of using fibre in the home or office requires small optical circuits that operate with low power. When these can be mass-produced in a cost-effective way it helps to keep the cost of the products down.
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"At the moment, optical switches tend to be millimetres in size. It is difficult to state which is the smallest optical switch ever made - but this is certainly one of them."
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By focussing on silicon as the material platform, the photonic devices developed by the group can be mass-produced in a similar way as computer chips for the microelectronics industry, and integrated with electronic circuitry on the same chip.
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The group aims to address the increasing need for optical components at all levels of the communications network that carries the ever-increasing flow of data over the internet.
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The work is part of the UK Silicon Photonics project, a consortium led by Surrey University, which has just received a funding boost from EPSRC, with £1.4M awarded to St. Andrews.
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