News
Engineers study whether 'light on a wire' is wave of future for circuitry If data drove itself around in cars, photonics would be a roomy minivan and electronics would be a nimble coupe. Photonic components such as fiber optic cables can carry a lot of data but are bulky compared to electronic circuits. Electronic components such as wires and transistors carry less data but can be incredibly small.A problem holding back the progress of computing is that with mismatched capacities and sizes, the two technologies are hard to combine in a circuit. Researchers can cobble them together, but a single technology that has the capacity of photonics and the smallness of electronics would be the best bridge of all. A new research group in Stanford's School of Engineering is pioneering just such a technology—plasmonics.
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