Technology is getting improved day by day as the researchers are working passionately. The use of electronic devices is increasing exponentially over the recent years. Devices such as computers and laptops are released every year with faster operating systems.
A latest research was done by a group of researchers. Milton Feng, the Nick Holonyak Jr. Emeritus Chair in electrical and computer engineering and his team working on the improvement of transistor technology published the results of their recent work in the Journal of Applied Physics. They described how a single transistor switch can produce two bistable outputs (optical and electrical). A process called Electron tunneling was used inorder to control the light transmission. A feedback loop is created due to the addition of this optical element.
These two bistable energy outputs allows the transistor to act as an opto-electrical switch. This switching technology can be used in optical logic required for future optical processors to communicate.
This transistor has three ports: –
- Electrical input port.
- Electrical output port.
- Optical output port.
This transistor technology works on the direct-voltage-modulation scheme rather than current modulation scheme.
The researchers discovered to make it as a transistor laser rather than diode laser, due to which the old engineers didn’t recognise about this technology.
What’s the difference between this transistor laser and the diode laser?
Diode laser has only two ports namely the electrical input port and the optical output port, due to which we only obtain the optical ouput.
But in case of transistor laser, three ports are there out of which two are bistable output ports. Thus, we can use the light speed in order to transmit the data very efficiently at a faster rate rather than usual electron-only transistor.
Why this technology?
This new transistor can provide two stable outputs optical and electrical with using a single switch. It can improve the operating speeds of processors even faster than standard electron-only transistors. Electron-only transistors creates a delay while communicating between various processors. This acts like an interference.
This technology since provides optical output, thus works at a speed of light.
Feng and his team are working towards this technology to find new ways where it can be adopted. This technology can also produce bistable outputs even at – 50°C. That’s really a huge achievement!
Previously they were working on this technology to operate at this – 50°C but in a recent news, they have also achieved to operate this device at room temperature.
“This is not only proving scientific point, but it’s useful for high-speed device modulation. We can directly modulate laser into femtosecond range. That allows us for tremendous amount of energy-efficient data transfer,” Feng said.
Can’t we just use all optics system for data transfer?
- We can’t eliminate the electronics part out of the system, as we need electricity inorder to convert data into binary and then to convert binary into light.
- We can either improve the use of optical transmission between various processors but can’t really neglect the electronics part.
- There can never be such ‘all optical systems’ to transfer data efficiently.