{"id":17393,"date":"2015-09-16T16:12:32","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T23:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:23:29","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:23:29","slug":"mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible","title":{"rendered":"MIT creates diode for light, makes photonic silicon chips possible"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a cornerstone of consumer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide efficient household, handheld, and automobile illumination, and, of course, without LEDs your router would not have <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Blinkenlights\">blinkenlights<\/a>. Thanks to some engineers from MIT, though, a new diode looks set to steal the humble LED\u2019s thunder. Dubbed a <em>diode for light<\/em>, and crafted using standard silicon chip fabrication techniques, this is a key discovery that will pave the path to photonic (as opposed to electronic) pathways on computer chips and circuit boards.<\/p>\n<p>In electronics, a diode is a gate that only allows electrons to pass in one direction (and with an LED, it also emits light at the same time). In this case, the diode for light \u2014 which is made from a thin layer of garnet \u2014 is transparent in one direction, but opaque in the other. Garnet is usually hard to deposit on a silicon wafer, but the MIT researchers found a way to do it \u2014 and that\u2019s really the meat of this discovery.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-106437\" title=\"Diode for light diagram\" src=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible2.jpg\" alt=\"Diode for light diagram\" width=\"300\" height=\"261\" \/><\/a>Basically, it\u2019s now possible, with regular chip-fab tools, to create an integrated silicon circuit with optical, rather than electronic, interconnects \u2014 both internally, and between other chips. Photons, moving through the kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.extremetech.com\/computing\/89688-new-transparent-photonics-chip-may-lead-to-faster-networks-and-cloak-of-invisibility\">transparent metamaterials<\/a> that would be required to make such a circuit, move a lot faster than electrons. Furthermore, optical channels, through <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wavelength-division_multiplexing\">wavelength-division multiplexing<\/a>, can carry a lot more data than electric signals. At the moment, hundreds of copper wires connect the CPU, northbridge, and memory \u2014 with on-chip photonic controllers, a motherboard might only have 10 or 20 channels.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.extremetech.com\/extreme\/106433-mit-creates-diode-for-light-makes-photonic-silicon-chips-possible\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a cornerstone of consumer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide efficient household, handheld, and automobile illumination, and, of course, without LEDs your router would not have blinkenlights. Thanks to some engineers from MIT, though, a new diode looks set to steal the humble LED\u2019s thunder. Dubbed a diode [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1694,1512,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-electronics","category-mobile-phones","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17393","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\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17393"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69548,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17393\/revisions\/69548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}