Scientific News  Computers, Internet, Software, Household and Office Equipment New computer technologies DEVICE COULD MAKE FOR FASTER INTERNET, BETTER TELECOMMUNICATIONS
DEVICE COULD MAKE
FOR FASTER INTERNET, BETTER TELECOMMUNICATIONS
 Whether
you're waiting for a computer to download the latest movie trailer, or just
holding for a long-distance phone call to connect, you may one day get faster
service as the result of a new device invented by Ohio
State University engineers.
The device, called an optical interconnect,
transfers data from one fiber optic cable to another, using an array of
microscopic mirrors on a silicon chip. Such data transfer is growing more and
more crucial as the Internet and other forms of communication clog busy networks
around the world.
Today, data can't switch between cables without
passing through slow and cumbersome electronics -- traditional wires that rely
on electrons to carry information, not pulses of light, as optical fibers do.
"Compared to optics, electrons are slower
than death on crutches," said Betty
Lise Anderson, associate professor of electrical
engineering at Ohio State. "So the bottleneck at these connection
points is fierce."
 The
answer: a device covered with tiny mirrors that will catch individual beams of
light from fiber optic cable, and reflect them off to their destination --
bypassing the traditional electronics that slow things down.
Anderson and Stuart
A. Collins, Jr., professor emeritus at Ohio
State's ElectroScience
Laboratory, recently received a patent for their optical interconnect, and
another patent on a related technology is pending.
"Imagine you wanted to send a message from
Syracuse to Cincinnati," Collins said. "Right now, that message could
travel by fiber optic cable, but it would have to pass through a series of
electronic hubs in between. It would have to be converted from light into
electrons, and back into light again. What we'd like to do is go directly from
light to light, with the help of mirrors, prisms and lenses."
While a handful of commercial companies have
already developed their own such devices, Anderson and Collins expect Ohio
State's optical interconnect will be superior. They've designed it to be
more compact, versatile, and durable.
The new design involves a silicon computer chip
covered with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrors, each only a few tens of
millionths of a meter across. The mirrors flip up and down to reflect the light
signals along the desired route.
Other optical interconnects currently under
development use a similar concept, Anderson said.
What makes Ohio State's design different is that
one of the mirrors is slightly askew -- on purpose. Beams of light that hit this
offset mirror are bumped off in a slightly different direction. By controlling
how many times a beam of light bounces off the mirrors -- and off the offset
mirror in particular -- researchers can guide a beam in virtually any direction.
The mirrors in other optical interconnects can
only point light beams in one direction, Anderson said. "If one of those
mirrors breaks, you can never make that connection again. With our scheme, if a
mirror fails, we wouldn't care, because other mirrors could take its place. We
would have many different ways of getting the same output."
The newly formed Technology Commercialization
Company, a subsidiary of the Science
and Technology Campus Corp. -- Ohio
State's research park development affiliate -- has created a company to
develop and commercialize this technology. Anderson and Collins are scientific
consultants for the new company, which is named Opticonnect,
Inc.
The engineers said a working model of the optical
interconnect could be years away, depending on the development of reliable
techniques to fabricate the mirrors, and partnership with industry to
commercialize the device.
#
Contact:
Source of the given news and the copyrights
belong to a Ohio State University
Publishing date: September 10, 2001
Back
| 
