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Technology Science

UCLA Researchers Demo First Silicon Laser 26

Posted by timothy from the perfect-for-self-destruct-switches dept.
An anonymous reader submits "Researchers at University of California, LA have demonstrated the first silicon laser. The lack of a silicon laser has been a major roadblock in the progress of silicon optoelectronics and photonics. This development shows that despite popular belief, a laser can indeed be made on a silicon chip. Modern electronic computers are getting closer to being optical in any case (gigahertz range). This discovery makes optical computers much closer to reality."
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UCLA Researchers Demo First Silicon Laser More

UCLA Researchers Demo First Silicon Laser

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  • Cue the Raman effect jokes...
  • From the UCLA [ucla.edu] "A key attribute of the new technology is that it can produce mid-infrared radiation without any cooling," Jalali said

    Now this sounds really intersting, how come they dont need cooling?

  • Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, and The Easter Bunny, not to mention the sun rising and setting.

  • One Question (Score:4, Funny)

    by Skynet ( 37427 ) on Saturday October 23, 2004 @06:49PM (#10610960) Homepage
    But can it be attached to a sharks head?

  • Low repetition rate and external pumping (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is nowhere near practical for integrated photonics. For one, the repetition rate is limited by the free carrier lifetime, which can range anywhere from about a nanosecond to several hundred nanoseconds, depending on how the waveguides are fabricated. So, the fastest the pulses can be repeated is about 1 GHz. Which is just slow even by todays standards. In this work they didn't even do that good, they repeated it at 25 MHZ. Slooow! And second, and the biggest problem, the Raman effect relies on an
    • And at this point there is no other easy way to make a silicon laser using anything other than the raman effect. Any other method would require the use of exotic materials (i.e. erbium, heterojunctions, etc.). It's been tried and the results aren't all that promising.

      Actually, it turns out that if you can produce structures small enough, you can get silicon acting like something closer to a direct-bandgap material (you no longer have a crystal of near-infinite extent, so energy level analysis changes).

      Th
  • >Modern electronic computers are getting closer to >being optical in any case (gigahertz range).

    Huh, last time I checked lasers were up there in the *TERA* hertz range.

    So what is the punchline here?
    If the poster means we need faster interconnects, then yeah verily, but that isn't the problem for CPU
    design. Feeding the buggers is. Since the 386 we haven't had memory which could keep them without grumbly tummy syndrome. Intel tried to lie to everybody about this, but even they eventually caved in and
  • A laser on silicon essentially solves the wiring problem of traditional digital integrated circuits (ICs). Modern digital ICs consist mostly of wires; a small percentage of the silicon area is the transistors that perform the computation.

    Two problems arise. Driving a signal from one end of the chip to the other end is very slow because the wires present a high RC load to the puny transistor. The other problem is simply routing the wires.

    The laser solves the first problem because we can simply transmi

    • A laser on silicon essentially solves the wiring problem of traditional digital integrated circuits (ICs). Modern digital ICs consist mostly of wires; a small percentage of the silicon area is the transistors that perform the computation.

      Not true last I checked, and I am presently doing IC design. Yes, you need plenty of space for your routing channels, but especially with the number of metal layers we have now, there's plenty of space _above_ the active circuitry even after you take out the layers used f
  • Will this make laser tag more fun?

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