New Laser May Help Computer Chip Industry

University of Toronto scientists report creating a laser that could help save the $200-billion computer chip industry from a looming crisis.

Electrical and Computing Professor Ted Sargent explained the speed and density of computer chips has risen exponentially over the years, and within 15 to 20 years the industry is expected to reach a point at which components can’t get any faster.

But the interconnect bottleneck — when microchips reach their capacity — is expected sometime around 2010.

To tackle that problem, Sargent, Canada Research chairman in nanotechnology, created the laser using colloidal quantum dots — nanometer-sized particles of semiconductor that are suspended in a solvent.

We’ve made a laser that can be smeared onto another material, said Sargent. This is the first paint-on semiconductor laser to produce the invisible colors of light needed to carry information through fiber-optics. The infrared light could, in the future, be used to connect microprocessors on a silicon computer chip.

A study describing the laser appears in the April 17 issue of the journal Optics Express.