Researchers have developed groundbreaking technology that solves the fundamental limitations of electronic devices.
The new technology, known as the “Optoexcitonic switch,” could lead to a new class of electronic devices, ranging from mobile phones and PCs to data centers and quantum computers that can operate without generating waste heat.
The new switch acts like a traditional electronic switch that uses electrical charge to control the flow of electrons in the system. The switch directs the flow of energy or controls the transmission of signals within the device.
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These electrons are charged, and produce “waste heat.” This is why laptops get hot when playing tough video games, and why large data centers run at extremely high temperatures.
On the other hand, the new “exciton” relies on neutrally charged “excitons.” This is a class of quasiparticles that have created electrons “stimulating” to be removed from their locations within the atom.
These excitation electrons leave holes that couple with free electrons. Together, the free-moving electrons that are now negatively charged and the holes they leave form a single quasiparticle called “excitons” that are positively charged and remain neutrally charged. The excitations have a neutral charge, so they do not generate heat when transferring information.
The power of light
The groundbreaking research, published on August 31st in the Journal ACS Nano, is the first excitation facility to create a switch that surpasses the performance of current Photonic switches and achieves overall cutting-edge performance.
“Electronics get hot because electronics always have capacitors,” co-author Parag Deotore, associate professors Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Applied Physics told Live Science. “Every time you store energy or release that energy, you heat it. The excitons are new charging neutral particles, like photons that don’t generate this heat.”
The new device improves electronic design by using excitons to overcome thermal problems and reducing the switches used to move information by two orders of magnitude.
Deotore said the long-term goal in developing these new switches is to create circuits of excitation materials that function efficiently enough that computer systems do not require fans and allow mobile phones to charge their batteries for much longer periods of time.
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Test “magic thickness”
The theory behind Excitonic Switches is sound, but engineering and testing new technologies has become the biggest challenge for the team. In traditional electronic systems, electrons are pushed where they need to pass through the charge of the brute force. The exciton lacks this option for neutral charging.
Scientists ordered excitons in linear arrays along a one-dimensional plane, using similarly neutrally charged photons to get where the excitons need to go.
The team created excitons and then influenced a certain number of photons. This was absorbed at the tip of the ridge to create exciton populations, Deotore said. In other words, this is a crowd of crowds standing still at the bottom of a straight line. The team then applied more photons until the excitons began to move. If they added too many photons, the excitation tool could not follow the ridge. Too fewer photons left the excitons still.
“Our prediction was that if we grew them thick enough, a light bond to the exciton would break the push, and we had to essentially have a magical thickness.
Light acts as a wave, so once magical thickness was achieved, the photon “pushed” the exciton. Observing this activity confirmed the theory and proved the experiment was successful, Kira added. “It’s easy to actually test for experiments because the color of the excitons changes along the ridge.
Based on the results of the experiment, the switch already meets or exceeds the capabilities of current technology.
The ultimate goal is to scale these switches into circuits that, on the surface, replace current electronics. Researchers say some advances are needed to achieve that goal, including finding new materials to manufacture and scale prototype devices used in the team’s experiments and developing techniques to scale them. However, the team believes these challenges can be overcome in decades.
The hope is that optoextonic switches and circuits can overcome waste heat. This is probably the biggest problem with computing. This will allow for a significant reduction in size and an exponential improvement in performance, scientists said.
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