The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
March 24, 2006
Optical fiber helped bring us the Internet, and silicon/germanium devices brought us microelectronics. Now, a joint team from Penn State and the University of Southampton has developed a new way to combine these technologies. The team has made semiconductor devices, including a transistor, inside microstructured optical fibers. The resulting ability to generate and manipulate signals inside optical fibers could have applications in fields as diverse as medicine, computing and remote sensing devices.
Optical fiber has proved to be the ideal medium for transmitting signals based on light, while crystalline semiconductors are the best way to manipulate electrons. One of the greatest current technological challenges is exchanging information between optics and electronics rapidly and efficiently. This new technique may provide the tools to cross the divide. The results of this research will be published in the March 17 edition of the journal Science.
"This advance is the basis for a technology that could build a large range of devices inside an optical fiber," said John Badding, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State. While the optical fiber transmits data, a semiconductor device allows active manipulation of the light, including generating and detecting, amplifying signals and controlling wavelengths. "If the signal never leaves the fiber, then it is faster, cheaper and more efficient," said Badding.
"This fusion of two separate technologies opens the possibility of true optoelectronic devices that do not require conversion between optical and electronic signals," said Pier Sazio, senior research fellow in the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. "If you think of the fiber as a water main, this structure places the pumping station inside the pipe. The glass fiber provides the transmission and the semiconductor provides the function."
Beyond telecommunications, optical fibers are used in a wide range of technologies that employ light. "For example, in endoscopic surgery, by building a laser inside the fiber you might be able to deliver a wavelength that could not otherwise be used," said Badding.
The key breakthrough was the ability to form crystalline semiconductors that nearly fill the entire inside diameter or pore of very narrow glass capillaries. These capillaries are optical fibers -- long, clear tubes that can carry light signals in many wavelengths simultaneously. When the tube is filled with a crystalline semiconductor, such as germanium, the semiconductor forms a wire inside the optical fiber. The combination of optical and electrical capabilities provides the platform for development of new optoelectronic devices.
The crystals were formed using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to deposit germanium and other semiconductors inside the long, narrow pores of the hollow optical fiber. In the CVD process, a germanium compound is vaporized and then forced through the pores of the fiber at pressures as high as 1,000 times atmospheric pressure and temperatures up to 500 degrees C. A chemical reaction within the fiber allows germanium to coat the interior walls of the hollow fiber and then form crystals that grow inward. "The process works so perfectly that you can get a germanium tube that has an opening in the center of only 25 nanometers through the length of the fiber," said Sazio. "This is only a tiny fraction of the diameter of the fiber pore, so it is essentially a wire." This is the first demonstration of building crystalline structures, which are best for semiconductor devices, inside the pores of the capillaries.
The team has built a simple in-fiber transistor, and they point to the success of the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier, which was invented at Southampton in the late 1980s, to illustrate the transformational possibilities of this technology. By incorporating the chemical element erbium into the fiber, the Erbium Amplifier allows efficient transmission of data signals in transoceanic optical fibers. "Without that kind of device, it would be necessary to periodically convert the light to an electronic signal, amplify the signal, and convert it back to light, which is expensive and inefficient" said Sazio. " Since its inception, the Erbium Amplifier has made the Internet possible in its current form."
Beyond the simple devices that this research has demonstrated, the research team sees the potential for the embedded semiconductors to carry optoelectronic applications to the next level. "At present you still have electrical switching at both ends of the optical fiber," said Badding. "If we can get to the point where the signal never leaves the fiber, it will be faster and more efficient. If we can actually generate signals inside a fiber, a whole range of optoelectronic applications become possible."
-----
Source: The Pennsylvania State University
(Digg, Technorati, more)
PGI Accelerator™ Fortran 95/03 and C99 compilers for x64+NVIDIA
Accelerate applications on x64+GPU platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing Fortran and C programs. Available now for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Download a free 15 day trial.
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager
Platform HPC Workgroup Manager integrates all the cluster productivity tools you need to deploy, run and manage your HPC environment.
Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...
Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...
Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...
Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...
Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...
Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.
Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.
Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.
Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.
LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html