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Smart fibre follows its own logic
Breakthrough allows transistor lining to do the work of switches and
modulators in optical links
Clive Akass,
Personal Computer World 22 Mar 2006
Researchers have found a way to create smart optical fibre capable of
performing tasks currently done by external electronics.
They have managed to create a transistor within a fibre just five millionths
of a metre in diameter by injecting vaporised germanium at very high pressure to
create a thin layer of crystallised semiconductor.
The work done at Southampton University's
Optoelectronics
Research Centre in Britain, and Penn
State University in the US, is essentially a proof of concept which
should lead to more complex devices.
Pier Sazio, a research fellow at Southampton and lead author of a report on
the work in
Science,
said the technique could be used to create modulators, which translate an
electronic signal into an optical one, or switches.
'The leap forward is to engineer rich optoelectronic functionality inside an
optical fibre,' he said.
One of the basic building blocks of fibre links and the Internet, the
erbium-doped fibre amplifier, was invented at Southampton in 1986; it allows
optical signals to be amplified without going through a slower electronic
process.
Another breakthrough announced this week,
a fast organic
transistor, was also co-developed at Southampton.
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