Tiny "black holes" on a silicon wafer make for a new type of photodetector that could move more data at lower cost around the world or across a datacenter. The technology, developed by electrical engineers at the University of California, Davis, and W&WSens Devices, Inc. of Los Altos, Calif., a Silicon Valley startup, is described in a paper published April 3 in the journal Nature Photonics.
"We're trying to take advantage of silicon for something silicon cannot usually do," said Saif Islam, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis, who co-lead the project together with the collaborators at W&WSens Devices, Inc. Existing high-speed photodetector devices use materials such as gallium arsenide. "If we don't need to add non-silicon components and can monolithically integrate with electronics into a single silicon chip, the receivers become much cheaper."
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