Optical ram holds prospect of optical packet switching
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A joint development by Belgian research institute IMEC and INTEC, its associated lab at Ghent University, is said to hold the prospect of optical packet switching with drastically reduced overall power consumption in high speed, high data rate optical telecommunication systems.
The partners have developed an 'ultra small and fast electrically pumped all optical memory on a silicon chip'. The optical random access memory has been created with microdisk lasers with a diameter of 7.5µm. Laser light can propagate in either clockwise or anticlockwise directions and the system can be switched between these modes using short optical pulses.
The lasers, implemented in InP membranes, are heterogeneously integrated onto passive silicon waveguide circuits. This allows to optically interconnect different memory cells using silicon wires.
While the transportation of the data bits between different points in such networks normally makes use of light pulses, it is quite a different story for the switching and routing of the data at the network nodes says IMEC. The absence of good optical random access memories means data has to be converted to the electrical domain. However, with the ever increasing amount of data the power consumption of such optoelectronic switches increases dramatically.
The results of the research – supported by the European FP7 projects HISTORIC and WADIMOS and performed in association with TU Eindhoven and the Institute for Nanotechnology in Lyon – have been published in the January issue of Nature Photonics.
