Future Trends in Microelectronics: From Nanophotonics to Sensors to Energy

Nanophotonics for Information Systems

Y. Fainman

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC-San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La J olla, California, 92093-0407, U.S.A.

1.   Introduction

Optics has the potential to solve some of the most pressing problems in communication and computing hardware. It promises crosstalk-free interconnects with essentially unlimited bandwidth; long-distance data transmission without skew and without power- and time-consuming regeneration; miniaturization; parallelism; and efficient implementation of important algorithms such as Fourier transforms. In the past, when the speed of digital computers was able to support only relatively small information processing throughput, optical information processing techniques were developed and used to construct processors and systems in support of numerous applications that required high throughput for real time operation. These methods exploited the parallelism of optics supported by the richness of the modal continuum of free space and a variety of optoelectronic devices that were developed in support of these applications and systems. The constructed information processing systems and concepts were used for image processing,^1–4 pattern recognition,^5,6 neural networks,⁷ and linear algebra calculus⁸ – to name a few. However with rapid advancements of the speed and, therefore, the information processing throughput of digital computers, the optical signal processing systems were not able to support these applications ...