At the core of this breakthrough is to get the element Germanium to act as a laser, for use as a light source on a new generation of mass produced silicon semiconductor chips using light particles or photons, instead of electronics for its functions- i.e. photonic chips.
The breakthrough by entrepreneur Dr Birendra Raj (Dutt) along with a top team of researchers at his own company APIC Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University will result in computer chips providing much greater performance at a tiny fraction of current power usage.
Germanium belongs to the same group of elements as silicon, making full integration of laser chips possible. While use of photons in chips is not new, till the present discovery of making germanium 'lase', it had not been possible to have integrated photon chips. Dr Dutt, an IIT-Kharagpur, aeronautical engineering alumnus of the class of 1971, founded APIC Corporation in 1999 for research, development and production of highly integrated photonic and electronic technology. Today his company has forged strategic relationships with a large number of universities and institutions in the US. It has a wholly-owned fabrication facility in Honolulu. The breakthrough research, which was achieved under a US government contract, was sponsored by the Naval Air Systems Command, Aircraft Division,(NAVAIR) and the National Security Agency (NSA) and funded by the US department of defence.
"APIC has achieved creating a Germanium LASER, until now thought to be impossible. Take these results as the Kitty Hawk demonstration where it was shown that manned flight was achievable," said Tony Tether, former Director of US Defence research organisation DARPA.
Dutt and APIC have teamed with the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in New York State (CNSE), with a plan of producing a fully manufacturable photonic chip in 2 years using this technology.
"Both the scientific community and industry have been waiting for a breakthrough like this and I am extremely proud of my team," Dutt said.
"But I am most excited about the practical effect on the world. We will now be able to use photons for many of the information functions that electrons have performed on silicon computer chips -- drastically reducing their power consumption while supercharging their performance," he said.
"This could contribute immensely to India's efforts to put make online services widely available for the public, and especially in isolated areas," Dutt said.
Dutt said the computer industry may feel the biggest effects of this groundbreaking feat.
The explosion in Internet requirements and data centers worldwide has resulted in enormous amounts of energy needed to satisfy the demand of all these power-hungry electronic processors.
Not only would Photonic chips use a fraction of the power currently needed, but because photons do not generate heat, much of the cooling used in computers and data centers also would be unnecessary, cascading the savings effect on the energy needed.
It will also reduce land and building requirements to accommodate the space and cooling equipment normally associated.
"Photonics is good for the environment." said Dutt.
"Photonic microprocessors will bring two enormous related advantages over conventional computing: speed-of-light communications and parallel processing," said Dutt.
"We have solved the latency problem that plagues multicore processors and complex computing," he added.
Programming has become extremely complicated to accommodate tiny differences in the times of arrival among electron signals to their cores, he noted adding that in in a photonic chip, all cores can talk to all other cores simultaneously, at the speed of light, so there is no delay.
"Photonics brings true parallel processing, emulating the human brain," said Dutt.
"Even the fastest computers today perform every function in serial, one after another, the same as they did last century. But the reason even a child can outthink most computers is that we process our information in parallel; we can access each memory and experience simultaneously, at once, to make a decision. Photonic microprocessors will be able to do that."
APIC now plans to commercially roll-out the fully manufacturable prototype of the photonic chip over the next 18-24 months and has teamed up with R&D fabrication facility at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany in New York state. "The performance increase comes with a stunning decrease in the amount of power needed as compared to today's chips. Voracious demand for online and mobile services, along with cloud computing, has caused explosive growth in the amount of data centres and the energy they gobble up. But photons simply require much less power than electrons to propel, and most importantly they do not generate heat. Using photonic processors and components would enable massive energy savings for data centres, which would consume only about 10% of today," Dr Dutt added.
Once the chip has been commercially launched, APIC Corporation could look at tie-ups with other chip makers for production. The company, which is a US government contractor, owns the patent for the photon chip technology and Dr Dutt believes that there could be opportunities in the future to look at tie-ups with institutions in India for making the photon-chip.
