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.'"

Comments

Re:how is glass different than silicon?

[amRadioHed]

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.

Re:how is glass different than silicon?

[Anonymous Coward]

glass is silicon dioxide. Silicon is pure Si.

Re:how is glass different than silicon?

[kmac06]

So is silicon, at for infrared wavelengths.

Re:how is glass different than silicon?

[ISoldat53]

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."

Re:how is glass different than silicon?

[canajin56]

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.

ohnoitsroland!!

[Smidge207]

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? . . .

Re:How do they do it?

[MightyYar]

The silicon crystals they grow for wafers are huge these days. Presuming that they draw it out the same way that they do traditional fiber optic cable, they'll get plenty of length.

A BIG optical fiber is 100 microns across (0.1 mm). A big wafer is 300mm. So they stretch down over 3000 times in size, which should give you 9 MILLION times the original length, unless my math fails me. I don't know how long the crystal is that they grow these days for wafers, but one only half a meter long should go a long way at that diameter...

Re:How do they do it?

[mapsjanhere]

the wavers are actually sliced out of big single crystalline cylinders; making the cylinders bigger was what slowed the progress of waver growth. I don't think you can "draw" the crystal in a conventional sense, but since the material is extremely clean, it should recrystalize back into a single crystal out of the melt.