New crystalline materials allow an optical fiber to have integrated, high-speed electronic functions. Researchers built an optical fiber with a high-speed electronic junction integrated adjacent to the light-guiding fiber core. The junction can convert light pulses (white spheres) traveling down the fiber into electrical signals (square wave).
For the first time, a group of chemists, physicists and engineers has developed crystalline materials that allow an optical fiber to have integrated, high-speed electronic functions. The potential applications of such optical fibers include improved tele and other hybrid optical and electronic technologies, improved laser technology, and more-accurate remote-sensing devices. The research was initiated by Rongrui He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State. The international team, led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, will publish its findings Photonics. Badding said one of the greatest current technological challenges is exchanging information between optics and electronics rapidly and efficiently. Existing technology has resulted in sometimes-clumsy ways of merging optical fibers with electronic chips - silicon-based integrated circuits that serve as the building blocks for most semiconductor electronic devices such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), computers and cell phones. "The optical fiber is usually a passive medium that simply transports light, while the chip is the piece that performs the electrical part of the equation," Badding said.
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