The Hindu Business Line : Now, multiple lasers on a silicon slab

They have shrunk the light-amplifying laser and squeezed over two dozen of them on a stamp-sized slab of silicon! On Monday, researchers at Intel — the world's number one chipmaker — and the University of California at Santa Barbara, announced the successful fabrication of an electrically-powered laser using the same material and manufacturing processes that go to create the silicon computer chip.

While practical applications might be a few years away, the breakthrough opens up the possibility that computers can communicate at least a thousand times faster than today, using optical than electrical, ones and zeroes.

`Raman Laser'

The researchers have created what they call a `hybrid silicon laser', that is, they have combined the conventional light-emitting properties of Indium Phosphide, a material being used to make communication lasers, but have harnessed the crystal-like nature of silicon, to amplify the light as it passes through the semiconductor material.

In effect, they have built what is known as a Raman Laser, etching a path or waveguide through the silicon slab, for the light beam to travel.

The `Raman Effect' discovered by Sir C.V. Raman in 1928, is used to help amplify the light signal — and in silicon, this works about 10,000 faster than in the glass tubes or fibres usually used to make lasers.

Technique

The technique of using silicon as an amplifier, to create a Raman laser was first announced by Intel researchers in a paper in Nature magazine in February 2005 .

However, a practical way to generate the light proved to be the stumbling block.

he hybrid solution gets over the problem — and might be said to have kick-started a new era of Silicon Photonics — realising optical communication building blocks in silicon.

Reduce cost

Once the manufacturing challenges are addressed, silico-optical components are expected to sharply reduce the cost of computer data communication, if 26 hybrid silicon lasers pump the light at 40 gigabits per second, that means one chip can transmit one terabit of data in one second.

That will make the average home PC a super-computing powerhouse.

Sir Raman had first published the results of his research in a joint paper with Mr K.S. Krishnan in the Indian Journal of Physics and then in the March 31, 1928 edition of Nature.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930.

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