Femtosecond Logic Gates With Lightwave Electronics
There gained’t be any chips utilizing mild based mostly logic gates on the market anytime quickly, however because of researchers on the College of Rochester within the US and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany have proven the way it might be attainable. Their mild field-driven logic gate consisted of tiny graphene-based wires linked to 2 gold electrodes which they illuminated with a laser pulse that lasted a number of tens of femtoseconds.
The laser pulse excites the electrons within the graphene wires, forcing them to propagate in single route to create {an electrical} cost and thus being measurable as a 1 or 0. The massive distinction between their previous experiments and this one is that they had been capable of preserve that propagation even after the laser was off, versus the cost being transient.
Their calculations recommend that their mild based mostly logic gates can function at as much as 0.36 Petahertz (360,000 GHz), carrying operations out in 2.8 femtoseconds. You’ll find extra particulars at PhysicsWorld, together with how these mild based mostly logic gates depend upon digital and actual digital cost carriers to succeed in this spectacular frequency. There may be additionally a hyperlink to their printed analysis in Nature on that web page.