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Optical Fiber With a Silicon Core
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the Optical Society of America, U.S. researchers have been able to create a practical optical fiber with a silicon core. As they were able to use the same commercial methods that are used to develop all-glass fibers, this might pave the way for future silicon fibers as viable alternatives to glass fibers. The scientists note that this should help increase efficiency and decrease power consumption in computers and other systems that integrate photonic and electronic devices. Here is a good summary by the lead researcher: 'In the past, we've needed one structure to process light and another to carry it. With a silicon fiber, for the first time, we have the ability to greatly enhance the functionality in one fiber.'"
There's a boob joke in here, somewhere.
Actually, the underlined text in the summary is called a link. Click it and you will see what is called TFA. It actually explains some of the potential advantages of the silicon core.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
glass is silicon dioxide. Silicon is pure Si.
Well, for one thing, glass is transparent.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Glass is typically an amorphous oxide SiOx. TFA says this is crystalline.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... with a silicon core.
More fiber!
So is silicon, at for infrared wavelengths.
From TA. "Usually an optical fiber is made by starting with a glass core, wrapping it with a cladding made from a slightly different glass, and then heating the structure until it can be pulled out into long wires. This works well enough, but for some wavelengths of light, a core made of pure crystalline silicon, like the one developed by the Clemson team, would better carry signals. Additionally, crystalline silicon exhibits certain nonlinear properties (in which the output is not proportional to the input) that are many orders of magnitude larger than for conventional silica glass. This would, for example, allow for the amplification of a light signal or for the shifting of light from one wavelength to another. The development of a silicon fiber opens the way for signal processing functions that are currently done electronically or in separate optical circuits to be performed directly inside the fiber, which allows for more compact, efficient systems."
Glass is made from silica, which is silicon dioxide. This, on the other hand, is pure silicon crystal. So, it's different in many ways, just as aluminium is different from corundum. Although admittedly silicon crystals are closer to glass than a beer can is to a ruby.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
OK, I've read TFA. Now all I want to know is: how the hell do they make many many kilometres of crystalline silicon? Amorphous Si, OK, I can understand, but getting it crystalline is amazing. Or do they mean polycrystalline? Wouldn't that ruin the optical properties?
-- Cheers!
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts.
Roland Piquepaille has an online journal. . . . It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less. Now let's talk about money.
This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month.
It appears that every single article submitted to Slashdot by Roland Piquepaille is accepted, and he submits multiple articles each month. As of today, it is clear that ten articles were accepted in October, six in November, and four in December (so far). See http://slashdot.org/~rpiquepa [slashdot.org] for yourself. Some generate lots of discussion; others very little. What is clear is that, on a whole, this generates a lot of traffic for Roland Piquepaille. Just over 150000 hits each month according to Blogads. And the higher the traffic, the higher the advertisement rates Roland Piquepaille can charge. So, why do the Slashdot editors accept every single story from Roland Piquepaille? Is the content of his journal interesting and insightful? Of course it is, but not by Roland Piquepaille's doing. The actual content of his journal is ripped from the real articles, but at least he gives them credit now. Does the content of his journal bring about energitic discussion from the Slashdot readership? Yes, because the original articles from which he got his content are well written and researched and full of details. So you may be asking, "What is so controversial about this?" Well, in almost every single article submitted by Roland Piquepaille, Slashdot readers complain that Roland Piquepaille is simply plaigarizing the original articles and .
Slashdot should instead link to the original articles. In essence, avoid going through the middle man (and making money for him!). The Slashdot readership that can see through Roland Piquepaille's farce objects on the basis that he stands to make a generous amount of money by doing very little work and instead piggy-backing on the hard work of other professional writers. Others argue that he is providing us with a service and should not be ashamed to want to get paid for it. But exactly what service is he providing us with? He copies-and-pastes the meat of his journal entries from professional and academic journals and news magazines and submits about seven or eight of these "articles" to Slashdot each month. Is this "service" worth up to $647 a month? Or, does each "article" represent up to $80 of work? . . .
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
will this new silicon fiber be more durable and less fragile than glass-fiber?
if not, what's the point?
They're using their grammar skills there.
I read the article and even did a quick google and did not gain any insight.
However, a Slashdotter replied to his question:
"glass is silicon dioxide. Silicon is pure Si."
And now I have learned something...woo-hoo!!!
Nice, cheaper FIOS in the near future.
Linear computing perhaps? Much more interesting than wearable computing. Reading TFA made me imagine multi-strand silicon core cable, one core being a sort of stacked CPU, another core being RAM, inductive bus (semi-conducting insulation perhaps?) another core power, one a colossal shift register, another a sort of EPROM for archival storage, etc. Why send bits along the wire when the wire could supply the bits directly? Wire archive?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Why in hell are you people still running Roland stories? You really don't care what your readers think, do you.
Yet unfortunately, there is no better analogy, since the only other semiconductor that people have heard of is carbon, and we all know that the oxidized form of carbon is very different from glass (at stp, anyways).
-1 offtopic
+1 informative
Optical fibers are made out of Fused Silica (SiO2) and typically have a germanium doped core. As someone that does research with optical fibers I am very interested to look at their findings and see what research ideas I can come up with.
The first thing I think of when I hear increased efficiency is not "oh great now my GBIC's will save a few mW of power" it's "that's great for international communications". The reason is a big part of the cost of an undersea cable is the boosting equipment and the weight and bulk required to provide power to them.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Does this mean the Earth is a giant computer powered by lightning? :)
All rites reversed 2010
...lies in the accentuated non-linear effects of Silicon over glass. As the article states, frequency-shifting and other optical processing feats can be performed in the fiber instead of having to do the photon-electron-photon dance. This makes WDM signal generation/detection much simpler. Imagine doing all the functions of one of these by choosing the right frequency-shifting fiber. The industry could standardize on a single laser frequency (193.10 THz) and insert DWDM signals by using fibers that shift the frequency by multiples of 25/50/100 GHz.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
from the OpticsExpress paper:
"measured propagation losses were 4.3 dB/m at 2.936 μm"
100x more than regular fiber, at wavelengths we don't use for communications... I'm not sure if I see how this is useful.
I suppose it's cool to have a Process to make Si-core fibers, but it's not like computer chips need 2 km of fibers inside, and it's clearly not useful for C-band optical communication,
Seems like it's just a buzzword due to "Silicon" being placed nearby "photonics".
*maybe* you can couple to chips better, simply because light's more tightly confined by the high-index Si?
Yes, it has.
Here are some links:
http://sciencegeekgirl.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/liquid-glass/
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_30_98/fob3.htm
http://www.thefoa.org/tech/glass.htm
http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C01/C01Links/www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html
This urban legend has been thoroughly debunked. An amorphous solid (which is what glass is) is still a solid.
As for the other posters in this thread and in parallel branches who claim that there's no melting point for glass... this is also factually untrue. See this article for details.