Helping silicon see the light

The ultra-small revolution is claimed to have begun with the invention of a laser that allows light to be used on a computer chip.

Assoc Prof David Moss, a senior researcher at the University of Sydney, is leading an international team that has developed a multiple wavelength laser on a silicon chip that produces light to process and transmit information and in doing so will speed up computing.

“The on-chip light source will be the key to enabling the simultaneous transmission of multiple data channels either on-chip or between chips in a single optical fibre, each at a different wavelength,” says Moss, adding that this technology will ultimately provide the consumer with cheaper and faster computers.

“Currently, information on a chip is shuffled around using electronic signals over copper wires, or interconnects. We know that metal is prone to ‘choking’ on the bandwidth bottleneck.”

Moss says using light for simultaneous multiple information processing is an important breakthrough.

With society’s demands for even faster technology, ultrafast on-chip and chip-to-chip optical data communications are important. More efficient methods to transmit vast amounts of data around circuit boards are needed.

Though multiple wavelength sources are already known, the team has developed them on a chip that, in principle, can not only be integrated with silicon computer chips (ie, CMOS) but can be also fabricated using the same methods.

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 integrated multiple wavelength source, not just to improve computing power, but for a wide range of applications including telecommunications, high-precision broadband sensing and spectroscopy, metrology, molecular fingerprinting, optical clocks and even attosecond physics.

Moss is a researcher with the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS) based within the School of Physics, The University of Sydney.