Now Just a Blinkin' Picosecond!
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April
28, 2000 -- Watches tick in seconds. Basketball games are
timed in 10ths of a second, and drag racers in 100ths. Computers
used to work in milliseconds (1,000ths), then moved up to microseconds
(millionths), and now are approaching nanoseconds (billionths)
for logic operations - and picoseconds (trillionths!) for the
switches and gates in chips.
"That's great in theory," says Dr. Donald Frazier of
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "Except that electronic
signals, even with Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and maximum
miniaturization, are bogged down by many aspects of the solid
materials they travel through. So we've had to find a faster
medium for the signals - and the answer seems to be light itself!"
Above: Dr. Donald Frazier monitors a blue laser light
used with electro-optical materials.
"What we are accomplishing in the lab today will result in development of super-fast, super-miniaturized, super-lightweight and lower cost optical computing and optical communication devices and systems," Frazier explained.
The speed of computers has now become a pressing problem as electronic circuits reach their miniaturization limit. The rapid growth of the Internet, expanding at almost 15% per month, demands faster speeds and larger bandwidths than electronic circuits can provide. Electronic switching limits network speeds to about 50 Gigabits per second (1 Gigabit (Gb) is 109, or 1 billion bits).
Dr. Hossin Abdeldayem, a member of Frazier's optical technologies research group, states that Terabit speeds (1 Terabit, abbreviated "Tb", is 1012, or 1 trillion bits) are needed to accommodate the growth rate of the Internet and the increasing demand for bandwidth-intensive data streams. Optical data processing can perform several operations simultaneously (in parallel) much faster and easier than electronics. This "parallelism" when associated with fast switching speeds would result in staggering computational power. For example, a calculation that might take a conventional electronic computer more than eleven years to complete could be performed by an optical computer in a single hour.
"All-optical
switching using optical materials can relieve the escalating
problem of bandwidth limitations imposed by electronics,"
says Dr. Abdeldayem. "In 1998, Lucent Technologies introduced
a lithographic submicron technology to further miniaturize electronic
circuits and enhance computer speed. Additional miniaturization
of electronic components only provides a short-term solution
to the problem. There are also physical problems accompanied
by miniaturization that might affect the computer's reliability.
"
Drs. Frazier and Abdeldayem and their group in Huntsville,
AL, have designed and built all-optical logic gate circuits for
data processing at Gigabit and Terabit rates, and they are also
working on a system for pattern recognition.
Left: Dr. Hossin Abdeldayem of NASA/Marshall works with
lasers to develop a system for pattern recognition.
"We have also developed and tested nanosecond optical switches, which can act as computer logic gates," says Dr. Abdeldayem, who recently presented the group's research paper entitled "All-Optical Logic Gates for Optical Computing" at The Pittsburgh Conference in New Orleans, LA.
"Picosecond and nanosecond all-optical switches, which act as AND and partial NAND logic gates were demonstrated in our laboratory," explains Dr. Abdeldayem. "Such logic gates are members of a large family of gates in computers that perform logic operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication. They are vital for the development of optical computing and optical communication. Our all-optical logic gates were made using a thin film of metal-free phthalocyanine compound and a polydiacetylene polymer in a hollow fiber"
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Optical Development Boom is Worldwide
Right: Blue and red lasers reflecting off mirrors -- a
glimpse of things to come in computing technology? Photo Credit:
Department of Energy/Coherent Inc Laser Group. Researchers from the University of Southern California working with a team from the University of California at Los Angeles have jointly developed an organic polymer with a switching frequency of 60 GHz -- three times faster than the current industry-standard lithium niobate crystal-based devices. Commercial development of such a device could revolutionize the "information superhighway" and speed data processing for optical computing. Another group at Brown University and IBM Corporation's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, have used ultrafast laser pulses to build ultrafast data-storage devices, achieving switching down to 100ps -- results that are almost ten times faster than currently available "speed limits".
In Japan, NEC Corporation has developed a method for interconnecting circuit boards optically using Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser arrays (VCSEL). Researchers at Osaka City University reported a method for automatic alignment of a set of optical beams in space with a set of optical fibers. Researchers at NTT in Tokyo have designed an optical back plane with free-space optical interconnects using tunable beam deflectors and a mirror. Their project achieved 1000 interconnections per printed-circuit board, with throughput ranging from 1 to 10 Terabits/sec. Companies, universities and government labs are reporting more all-optical and organic technology developments almost weekly. Stay tuned for more hot future news in this bright new realm of science! |
Photonics
development is booming worldwide in optics and optical components
for computing and other applications. Estimates of global photonic
technology sales in 1999 were as high as $100 billion and rising
with the ever-increasing demands of data traffic. KMI Corp. reports
data traffic growing at 100% per year worldwide, while London's
Phillips Group estimates that U.S. data traffic will increase
by 300% annually.
Logic gates are the building blocks of any digital system," he continues. "An optical logic gate is a switch that controls one light beam with another. It is "on" when the device transmits light, and "off" when it blocks the light."
"Our phthalocyanine switch operates in the nanosecond
regime (i.e., Gigabits per second), functioning as an all-optical
AND logic gate. To demonstrate it, we waveguided a continuous
(cw) laser beam co-linearly with a nanosecond pump beam through
a thin film of metal-free phthalocyanine. The output was sent
to a fast photo-detector and to an oscilloscope. The cw beam
was found to pulsate synchronously with the pump beam, showing
the characteristic table of an AND logic gate."
Right: A schematic of the nanosecond all-optical
AND logic gate setup. More schematics and illustrations are available
in "Recent Advances
in Photonic Devices for Optical Computing" by NASA/Marshall's
Hossin Abdeldayem, Donald O. Frazier, Mark S. Paley, and William
K. Witherow.
"Our setup for the picosecond switch was similar, except that the phthalocyanine film was replaced with a hollow fiber coated from inside with a thin polydiacetylene film. Both collinear laser beams were focused on one end of the tube, and a lens at the other end focused the output onto a monochrometer with a fast detector attached. The product of the two beams demonstrates three of the four characteristics of a NAND logic gate."
"Optical bistable devices and logic gates such as these are the equivalent of electronic transistors," concludes Dr. Abdeldayem. "They operate as very high speed on-off switches and are also useful as optical cells for information storage."
According to Dr. Frazier, these all-optical computer components and thin-films developed by NASA are essential to the current worldwide work in electro-optical hybrid computers - and will help to make possible the astounding organic optical computers that will be the standard of future terrestrial and space information, operating and communication systems.
Web Links"Recent
Advances in Photonic Devices for Optical Computing"
by NASA/Marshall's Hossin Abdeldayem, Donald O. Frazier, Mark
S. Paley, and William K. Witherow. 700kb in Microsoft Word format.
Pushing the
Limits of Computer Technology -- Science@NASA headline story
from May 1999.
Microgravity News - Winter 1995 report about the Alliance for Nonlinear Optics.