Researchers at Intel Laboratories have published a report indicating progress on building a silicon-based Avalanche Photo-Detector (APD) that would offer lower costs and improved performance as compared to previous photo-detector designs. Photonics might replace copper circuits carrying electrons with components using photons of light to transmit signals. With successful photonics, signal bandwidths could be increased by several orders of magnitude, and computer design problems including EMI, heat, and resistance would be reduced. The APD device created by Intel researchers used silicon and CMOS processing to achieve a “gain-bandwidth product” of 340 GHz— the best result ever measured for this key APD performance metric. This achievement opens the door to lowering the cost of optical links running at data rates of 40 Gps or higher and demonstrates, for the first time, that a silicon photonics device can exceed the performance of a device made with traditional, more expensive optical materials such as indium phosphide. Learn more from theIntel press release, or buy the entire article at theNature Photonics website.
Photonics Discovery Could Replace Copper Circuits Thus Eliminating EMI, Resistance, & Heat
