Glass is a promising material for post silicon era and future hybrid Electronics-Photonics technology

Silicon (Si) based microelectronics, that had revolutionized electronics, computing and communications, has reached its limits and researchers are exploring various technologies to replace silicon, that can satisfy humanity’s need for faster, smaller, greener and more powerful computers. One of class of materials, that are being explored are Phase-change materials (or PCMs) that can switch between two structural phases with different electrical states, one crystalline and conducting and the other glassy and insulating, in billionths of a second.

 

Chalcogenide glass is an increasingly important tool for the optical designer, providing a versatile material for many applications—from thermal imaging to hyperspectral imaging. The properties of these amorphous glasses are useful over a broad spectral range, from the near-infrared (NIR) at 700 nm well into the LWIR spectrum. Chalcogenide glasses consist of mixtures of the Group 16 elements selenium (Se), sulfur (S), and tellurium (Te), and various Group 14 and 15 elements such as arsenic (As), germanium (Ge), tin (Sn), and others.

 

As traditional IR materials such as Ge and zinc selenide (ZnSe) rise in cost, the use of chalcogenide glasses is becoming more widespread. Chalcogenide materials offer substantial savings today in both the raw material cost and in fabrication methods such as molding technology. They also provide numerous benefits to systems with stringent specifications.

 

Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years. Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

 

The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C ) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. As a very stable and safe form of portable memory, the technology could be highly useful for organisations with big archives, such as national archives, museums and libraries, to preserve their information and records

 

The chalcogenides materials currently, are being used solely as either electronic materials or optical materials, with different types for each application. In the future, their properties give them the potential to combine the excellent optical properties of one material with the excellent electronic properties of another and vice versa.

 

Thus, these materials have potential for development of hybrid ‘optoelectronic’ technology, which is a hybrid of the optical and electronic systems, but without the current limitations imposed by the two current technologies working independently.