What is a hybrid silicon laser?

Hybrid silicon laser is a new type of laser, developed in 2006 by Intel and University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). This laser is made of semiconductor materials of the III-V Group (eg Gallium (III) Arsenide, Indium (III) of the same type used in bulk computer chips and silicon. The hybrid silicon laser is different from the laser diodes that we currently use in our computers and CD players, based on India phosphide, which must be individually assembled and balanced for each unit and cannot be produced in the same way as computer chips.

separate semiconductor wafers III-V must be used to produce jet laser diodes. Hybrid silicon lasers are primarily made of silicon and are made on silicon Wafter, which thanks to photolithography and computing revolution we have extensive experience with a mass statement. Hybrid silicon lasers significantly drop the cost of building the laser.

Although hybridSilicon lasers will also use phosphid india to generate light, not using the chemical for the route, detection, modulation and amplification of light, as in normal laser diodes, but instead uses silicon. Hybrid silicon lasers are a huge step towards integrating optical systems with conventional computer chips, which could allow data processing speeds and transfer speeds a hundred times faster than the best we have today. These transmission rates would be more of a tertity level rather than at the level of gigabit or megabit we see today.

Hybrid silicon lasers are part of a research program called Photonic Computing, which wants to see how computer chips use light in tangent with electrical impulses to process data. Light requires less energy per unit of data. Hybrid silicon lasers can be in bulk on an industrial scale, with hundreds or more to Smrti. Numer lasers on a photonics chip would be required to create a computer. Another necessary step towards real photonics would be technology that literally stops the light in the crystal, analogous with the storage of electrons in contemporary computer logic. Preliminary research showed promising results in this direction.