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Optical switching

Excitonic interconnects

Nature Photonics volume 3, pages 558–560 (2009)Cite this article

Interconnects and switches relying on excitons — quasiparticles consisting of bound electron–hole pairs — may offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to electrons in wires for future electronic circuitry.

The evolution of computing to many-core processors and teraflop machines capable of performing more than one trillion operations per second is imposing a significant burden on processor communication subsystems. To minimize heat generation and power-delivery challenges, energy efficiency is required everywhere; both within the processor cores and also in the communication fabric that connects independent cores, CPU-integrated cache memory and external memory. Today, the wires used in this fabric occupy significant physical space and become increasingly inefficient as data rates rise. Even the adoption of carbon nanotubes and graphene will probably only improve the resistive loss and transient delay of electrical interconnects by a factor of 2–4, and their deployment is being delayed owing to integration issues with standard electronic materials1.

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Figure 1: Schematic of an excitonic switch and its principle of operation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,

    Marc Baldo & Vladimir Stojanović

  2. Energy Focused Research Center for Excitonics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Marc Baldo

  3. Marc Baldo

Authors
  1. Marc Baldo
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  2. Vladimir Stojanović
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Baldo, M., Stojanović, V. Excitonic interconnects. Nature Photon 3, 558–560 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2009.178

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