ON THE ARTIFICIAL SEMICONDUCTOR MATERIALS

Abstract

For about the last three decades, semiconductor technology began to make its most apparent impact in Solid State Electronics. The field of photonics, which combines laser physics, electro-optics and nonlinear optics has expanded tremendously. Notably, modern light wave communications exemplify photonic systems. Here, optical signals are generated, modulated, transmitted, and detected before they are transformed to electrical form for final use. Optical processing of information has notably been found to possess several advantages over electronic processing, which must usually be done serially and is limited in speed by the broadening of pulses in interconnecting wires and also limited in density by cross talk between those wires. Optical systems capable of handling very large quantities of data is now awaiting only the development of convenient digital optical logic elements with low switching energy. An ideal material for opto-electronic applications as mentioned above should be able to transform light into current and vice-versa for emission and detection. The material should also exhibit large electronic and optical nonlinearities that would allow one to use it as a transistor and optical gate. These materials which are currently internationally studied are presented in this paper. [Global Jnl Engineering Res. Vol.1(2) 2002: 151-162]