although we are not talking about replacing the transistors in conventional chips with optical transistors. Photonics complements and interfaces with electronics.
How nanophotonics can combine with microprocessors Photonic chips, or photonic integrated circuits (PICs), represent a new paradigm in information processing. Over the past decade, CUDOS and other researchers around the world have created PICs for a range of applications spanning communications, computing, defence and security, medicine and sensing. In communication systems, photonic chips can increase the capacity of our communication networks. In data centres, they are reducing the energy consumption, which matters because every Google search today consumes the energy required to boil a cup of water. In defence, photonic chips can enhance radar technology that helps protect our assets and personnel. And in health, we can reduce the scale and complexity of medical devices that are used to diagnose disease. Another benefit is in ‘switching’, which is central to all communication networks. At the new Sydney Nanoscience Hub, we are building nanoscale switching technologies that can switch at the speed of light, thousands of times faster than current switching technology. We are using state-of-the-art lithography, such as the tools in the Nanoscience Hub’s clean room, to fabricate nanoscale circuits and structures. Lithography literally means printing, but in this context we are printing circuits on silicon wafers with nanometre scale features.
Bright future So what’s next? We need to transform PICs into active devices that sense and interact, analyse, respond to and manipulate their environment. We are already building photonic
spectroscopy techniques into the same silicon chip that performs electronic processing in smartphones. This will potentially enable
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smartphones to perform tasks such as medical diagnosis, including analysing blood or saliva, or sense pollutants in the environment via spectroscopy technologies. But photonics is not well suited to some of these tasks.
So we need moving parts that can manipulate the microscopic world; we need mechanical actuation at the nanoscale, and we really would prefer a chip with no moving parts. Our approach is to use sound waves that can be generated on the chip. These are not the traditional sound waves that we hear or use in ultrasound, but ultrahigh frequency sound waves. We refer to them as ‘phonons’, which are particles of sound, just as photons are particles of light. We are talking about hypersound, phonons with frequencies from 100 megahertz to tens of gigahertz. We are building a completely new chip that incorporates a photonic circuit for these hypersound phonons. Harnessing hypersound on a chip enables the manipulation of microscale biological and chemical elements, which means we can mix, sort and select and even create a centrifuge on a chip. This is a laboratory-on-a-chip that can be integrated into the smartphone. This represents a new paradigm for information processing. The speed of sound is about 100,000 times slower than the speed of light. We can couple information from the light wave to hypersound and store information.
The phonon frequencies coincide with the radio frequencies that are important in next generation mobile communications and radar, which allows us to process these microwaves via the interaction between optical and phonon waves.
Australia has always punched well above its weight in photonics research and commercialisation. We now have the nanoscience and nanotechnology infrastructure and capacity to take the next big step, which is to bring photonics onto the chip, where it will transform our lives. l
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