Germanium Diodes Mean Progress Toward Silicon-Chip Lasers 66
David Orenstein writes "Teams at Stanford and MIT have each reported getting
strong light signals from germanium-based diodes on silicon at room temperature. Engineers have long sought to do this because, with further refinement into lasers, such diodes would allow for optical interconnects on chips. Optical interconnects could operate much faster and with less power than electrical (metal) ones that are becoming bottlenecks on current chips."
Ya my computer caught that flu going around. (Score:2, Insightful)
I smell a future of fiber optics and biologically based storage (aka - the brain). Clearly they have exhausted the current technology in terms of exponential breakthroughs.
Imagine a computer that was powered by liquid supplements rather than electricity.
It would be nice to know that my computer could actually feel my punches when it misbehaved.
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, lets have that lead to jobs for the west, rather than simply giving the tech to China. All fo this American paid for RD, should require that the work stay in the west.
Do you really want to deny the West the advances in manufacturing that the Chinese have contributed?
It's a global economy now. Get used to it.
Re:Great (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, lets have that lead to jobs for the west, rather than simply giving the tech to China. All fo this American paid for RD, should require that the work stay in the west.
Do you really want to deny the West the advances in manufacturing that the Chinese have contributed?
It's a global economy now. Get used to it.
Because copying Henry Ford and making up for that with cheap near-slave labor is a grand contribution. By that standard, the plantation owners of the Old South were models of efficiency and innovation. Hell, they had a technique so "advanced", they didn't have to pay their workers at all! I'd say that one-ups the China model, though not by very much.
And if you want to dumb this down by talking about lithography and the use of it by the Chinese to make integrated circuits, just ask yourself whether it was the Chinese who invented it, or the Chinese who merely have a gigantic economic advantage for its use (which they copied) since they are competing against Western societies that won't accept slave wages.
The 40-year old promise (Score:5, Insightful)
Some scientists showed off SiC blue LEDs in the '60s that shown brilliantly like laser light, but were not the read deal. The real blue room-temperature laser had to wait for Nakamura and a direct bandgap material.
Doping, adding nitrogen, and adding defects to the lattice to produce more light is nothing new. Look at your stop lights. It's working there, but don't count on these indirect materials suddenly turning into lasers. No need to hold your breath.
A quick scientific note. Photons have a lot of energy, but not much momentum. You get hot on a sunny day, but not blown over by the sun. Electrons fall almost directly down in the bandgap diagram to produce light. This makes direct-gap semiconductors useful for lasers. The trick one can use is to provide momentum-shifting impurities to the lattice of an indirect bandgap crystal. The electron creates a photon by dropping directly down, but some other mechanism shifts the electron momentum to create an overall diagonal transition. It's not efficient, but it works.