# MIT, Vienna university develop 'optical transistors'



## TechSocial (Dec 20, 2011)

The future of optical computing has gotten brighter, as separate announcements by MIT and an Austrian university each claim breakthroughs in optical transistors.

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology said recently that theyve been able to achieve a key step on the road to building an optical transistor, which could be the foundation of an optical computer some day. Back on this side of the Atlantic, at MIT, researchers have built an optical switch that can be tuned by a single photon.

Researchers have hoped to replace electron-based silicon transistors for years for several reasons, not the least of which is managing the power consumption used by computers and the chips that power them. Electrical transistors produce waste heat, which can build up in a computer and damage the chip itself unless properly cooled.

To date, optics have been used as the foundation of high-speed communication networks to transmit massive amounts of data across short distances.Companies like Intel have managed to use optical cables to connect boards within servers, but optics-based chips have largely remained lab experiments, with companies like IBM working to further the technology.

Thats the goal of both the MIT and the TU Vienna researchers, which detailed their work in recent academic papers.

Specifically, the TU Vienna researchers said that theyve been able to adjust the polarization of light via an electrical current, which would create the ones and zeroes that form the foundation of the binary nomenclature that underlies computing. Moreover, the researchers achieved this using light at one terahertz frequencies, potentially allowing those computers to operate at about 250 times the speed of the fastest 4-GHz chips today.

This is the very principle of a transistor, said Prof. Andrei Pimenov, in a statement released by the Institute of Solid State Physics of TU Vienna. The application of an external voltage determines whether current flows or not, and in our case, the voltage determines whether the light arrives or not.

Read More


----------

