{"id":144763,"date":"2022-08-25T01:24:27","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T06:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/photonic-transistor-switches-light-signals-instead-of-electronic-signals"},"modified":"2022-08-25T01:24:27","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T06:24:27","slug":"photonic-transistor-switches-light-signals-instead-of-electronic-signals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/photonic-transistor-switches-light-signals-instead-of-electronic-signals","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Photonic transistor\u2019 switches light signals instead of electronic signals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/photonic-transistor-switches-light-signals-instead-of-electronic-signals.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2014 <span class=\"wp-smiley emoji emoji-face_with_colon_three\" title=\":3\">face_with_colon_three<\/span> <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Electronic transistors, which act as miniature switches for controlling the flow of electrical current, underpin modern-day microelectronics and computers. State-of-the-art microprocessor chips contain several billion transistors that switch signals flowing in electrical wires and interconnects. With increasing data-processing speeds and shrinking chip sizes, however, wires and interconnects waste considerable energy as heat.<\/p>\n<p>One alternative is to replace electrical interconnects with energy-efficient <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/optical+interconnects\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">optical interconnects<\/a> that carry data using <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/light+signals\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">light signals<\/a>. However, a practical analogue of the transistor for optical interconnects does not yet exist. Hence, Vivek Krishnamurthy from the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers in Singapore and the United States are developing a practical \u2018photonic transistor\u2019 for optical interconnects that can control light signals in a similar manner to electronic <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/transistors\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">transistors<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers\u2019 latest photonic transistor design is based on prevalent semiconductor technology and offers attractive attributes of high switching gain, low switching power and high operating speed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2014 face_with_colon_three Electronic transistors, which act as miniature switches for controlling the flow of electrical current, underpin modern-day microelectronics and computers. State-of-the-art microprocessor chips contain several billion transistors that switch signals flowing in electrical wires and interconnects. With increasing data-processing speeds and shrinking chip sizes, however, wires and interconnects waste considerable energy as heat. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}