All-Optical Transistor (AOT)
The ultimate vision of is the application of Lightwave's next generation material platform to the fabrication of an entirely new generation of microprocessors that are magnitudes faster, less expensive, smaller, require less power and can imprinted on plastic sheets in the same fashion that newspapers are printed in rolls. These beyond next generation computers will be optical instead of electrical in nature and fabricated entirely out of plastic instead of silicon, displacing the almost century –long reign of silicon as the base material of the modern computer. In the future, all-optical signal processing will become possible where one frequency of light controls the flow of another frequency of light (light switching light instead of electricity switching light). The ability of a material to support light controlling light is referred to as the "third -order" effect and is a primary potential application of Lightwave's polymer material platform. Just as the electrical transistor became the building block for the integrated circuit and microprocessor industries, the all optical transistor is expected to form the basis of the future's all optic device applications. All optical devices convert data in the form of input light signals to a secondary light data stream. Some experts anticipate that all optical transistors will replace traditional transistors used today in microprocessors, resulting in an entirely new, ultra high speed generation of inexpensive, "plastic" computers operating largely on light instead of electricity |
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