“The industry is focused on adding photonics to silicon electronic chips, and this has become an industrial reality,” Mitchell said. In large data centres, for instance, the amount of information that needs to be transmitted demands the use of optical fibres. It also means lithium niobate could address some of the shortcomings of silicon. “This enables its integration with other platforms or confining the light and enabling these tight circuits to integrate more components.” RMIT’s Arnan Mitchell (left) and the University of Adelaide’s Andy Boes. “In the past, lithium niobate was available as a bulk material, so this meant rather thick substrates, and what became recently possible is to have these as very thin films,” Dr Andy Boes, a University of Adelaide Senior Lecturer who has been collaborating with Mitchell, told create. And recent advances in manufacturing have meant it is much more feasible to produce it in a form suitable for semiconductor wafers. But researchers like Mitchell, the Director of RMIT’s Integrated Photonics and Applications Centre, thought lithium niobate still held potential.įor a start, it has valuable uses in photonics, due to its ability to produce and manipulate the full spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and not just visible light. You have a lithium niobate device, and it does one thing it’s not an integrated circuit.”įor integrated circuits, the basis of the sophisticated electronics that permit modern computing, silicon became the norm. “There was one in every television by the 1970s,” RMIT Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell told create. As researchers explored these properties, they began to introduce the material into a variety of technologies, and it became a well-established part of the telecommunications industry. The material appeared to have ferroelectric properties, allowing its polarity to be manipulated, and is piezoelectric, meaning a charge can induce movement in it - or vice versa. When lithium niobate was first synthesised in 1949 at Bell Laboratories in the United States, the extent of the hopes of the engineers working on it were that it might prove useful in telecommunications. Recent advances have expanded an old material beyond niche telecommunications applications and put it at the forefront of a potentially thriving new Australian industry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |