Researchers at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, NJ, have designed a crucial optical component–a filter that cleans up signals as they travel through a network–that is made completely of silicon.
The fiber-optic networks that zip video clips and other data around the Web rely on devices made of expensive semiconductor materials for many operations, making it difficult to expand bandwidth inexpensively.
Apart from improving fiber-optic networks, silicon filter abridged the potential to finally bring the speed of photonic data transfer, which is much faster than copper wiring, to computer circuit boards and microprocessors, says Sanjay Patel, technical manager of integrated photonic research at Bell Labs.
Historically, photonic devices–such as lasers and detectors that produce and collect light, modulators that encode bits of data on that light, and equalizers and filters that clean up signals–have been made out of expensive semiconductors such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide.
In 2005, researchers at Intel announced the first silicon laser, and soon thereafter, a handful of other organizations, including MIT, Cornell, and the University of California, announced other silicon-photonics firsts.
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