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A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation bandwidth of 2.75 gigahertz while consuming just 25 milliwatts of power. Its design was optimized to bring newfound speed and efficiency to communication links in data centers.
As the team of researchers reports in IEEE Electron Device Letters, this achievement is the result of an extensive program of theoretical modeling and empirical testing, providing a roadmap to scaling down LED devices for optical communications.
For the record-breaking device, the design was optimized to a size of 5 micrometers. The team hopes that their design will prove to be a vast improvement in speed and efficiency over conventional wire interconnects and even laser-based optical links for short-range communication.
"Ninety percent of communications in data centers is short range, meaning less than 10 meters (33 feet)," said Illinois Grainger Engineering graduate student Abdelghany Abouelnagga, the study's lead author. "It is standard to use lasers for the kind of high-frequency communications needed in this context, but lasers are power hogs. If we want to manage energy use in data centers, we need to consider lower-power optical communications such as LEDs, and we show exactly how to do so."
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