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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the let-there-be-light dept.

At the present, companies like Intel are mass-producing transistors 14 nanometers across – just 14 times wider than DNA molecules. They're made of silicon, the second-most abundant material on our planet. Silicon's atomic size is about 0.2 nanometers.

Today's transistors are about 70 silicon atoms wide, so the possibility of making them even smaller is itself shrinking. We're getting very close to the limit of how small we can make a transistor.

At present, transistors use electrical signals – electrons moving from one place to another – to communicate. But if we could use light, made up of photons, instead of electricity, we could make transistors even faster. My work, on finding ways to integrate light-based processing with existing chips, is part of that nascent effort.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:37PM (#436896)

    I'm not defending the article, it is heavy on describing silicon transistors and light on optical details... I've never heard of the latency issue, but it sounds like a problem when interfacing standard electrical circuits to optical. If so, that doesn't mean there wouldn't be applications for optical transistors, care to bring up the details one more time for this thread?

  • (Score: 2) by dlb on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:46PM

    by dlb (4790) on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:46PM (#436914)
    If the processing can be kept within light-based transistors, then there should be no conversion (and no conversion latency) until the output had to be handed off. At that point the heavy work is done, and if so, O/E conversion latency would be insignificant.
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @01:41AM (#437041)

      I'll believe that when it snows in Hawaii.