It is time for a TwisTed chemistry class. Ladies & Gentlemen do you know what the element germanium is? Well germanium is a brittle, crystalline, gray-white metalloid element used as a semiconductor. It was discovered by Clemens Winkler in my country of birth, Germany in the year 1886.
Now you may be wondering “Mr. TwisT why do I care about this?” Well the answer is simple you probably don’t just yet. Germanium is used as a semiconductor as an alloying agent, in things such as guitar amplifiers and things like camera & microscope lenses.
Now you might be a little more interested. However we are still not quite on topic so now I will explain in further detail why this old metalloid is of interest to you.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or (MIT) for those of you whom don’t want to connect the dots; have demonstrated the first laser that uses the lovely element germanium. This laser is particularly special as it operates at room temperature. They believe this will become an important step toward computer chips that will move data using light instead of electricity.
A professor in the electric engineering & computer science department of the University of California named Eli Yablonovitch says: ““This is a very important breakthrough, one I would say that has the highest possible significance in the field. It will greatly reduce the cost of communications & make for faster chips.”
Now in today’s world things are becoming faster & more efficient. However although processors are becoming faster and more powerful a barrier between communications still exists. Simply moving data from chip to chip is taking too long & thus slowing down over all performance; now higher bandwidth connections are required just to send data to memory. The traditional copper connections are slowly becoming impractical because of the amount of energy consumed to transport data at increasingly higher & higher rates.
Copper unlike the new laser that was recently demonstrated generates excess heat. This heat inflicts design limitations. The more copper chips, the more heat generated & thus more heat bringing further limitations. Engineers are then required to find and develop ways of dissipating the excess heat. So you can now understand the appeal of this new laser & its specific operating temperature.
One of the most curious areas of computer research is trying to use a laser to concentrate light into a narrow & powerful beam to transmit data. This is known as photonic computing. The laser is completely new to physics says Lionel Kimerling, one of the professors at MIT whose research group developed the germanium laser.
Lasers have to this date had to be external and separately constructed & then grafted onto chips, instead of integrating them within the same silicon that holds the chips’ circuitry. This reduces the efficiency of the chips and increases the cost.
The new laser made with germanium solves this problem, because in theory could be built alongside of the rest of the microchip with similar processes in the same factory. Lowering manufacturing costs and removing any middle man that would otherwise increase the cost of the product.
Although this is a very highly researched topic it will still take several years to figure out all the complexities of intergrating this laser into a standard silicon process. At some point, the researchers at MIT believe that the new germanium lasers could not only perform as communications between microchips, but as well as the logic elements of the microchips as well. This would allow computers to then perform processes using light instead of electricity.
It is however not believed that this technology will replace electricity entirely. University of California, Berkeley’s Yablonovitch says: “I think we will be using light in conjunction with electronic logic circuits,” he says. “Light allows internal communications much more efficiently, but the logic elements themselves are likely to remain driven by electricity.”
Now all we have to do is wait and see, and then wait until somebody adds LEDs to it all.
-TwisT
