Light effect transistors for high speed and low energy switching and beyond

Abstract

A semiconductor nanowire based photo-conductive device, referred to as light effect transistor (LET), is demonstrated for replicating the field effect transistor (FET) functions with potentially higher speed and lower switching energy, and offering novel, beyond FET functionalities, e.g., optical logic gates and optical amplification. In an integrated photonic circuit, photonic components are typically used for interconnection between electronic subsystems. A hybrid electronic-photonic integrated circuits with LETs with FETs on one chip can take the advantages of the two worlds and mitigate their shortcomings, which will offer major improvement in performance over the pure electronic version.