Part IV

Photonics: Light to the Rescue

4    Photonics: Light to the Rescue

We conclude the book with a part on photonics – a subject seemingly orthogonal to microelectronics. Electrons, being highly localized, are naturally suited for information processing, whereas photons are highly delocalized and thereby ideal for information transmission. Traditionally, electronics and photonics were pursued separately by different specialists. In the modern context, they can remain complementary but need not to stay orthogonal. As will be powerhlly argued through a series of in-depth analyses by several leading researchers, photonics can both offer solutions to some of the most difficult and demanding problems in microelectronics, interconnects being one example, and open new spaces of applications, such as photovoltaic power sources, sensing, and real-time transmissive imaging and spectroscopy.

Contributors

4.1    D. A. B. Miller

4.2    M. N. Abedin, I. Bhat, S. D. Gunapala, S. V. Bandara, T. F. Refaat, S. P. Sandford, and U. N. Singh

4.3    Q. Hu, B. S. Williams, S. Kumar, A. W. M. Lee, Q. Qin J. L. Reno, H. C. Liu, and Z. R. Wasilewski

4.4    E. H. Linfield, J. E. Cunningham, and A. G. Davies

4.5    S. Suchalkin, M. Kisin, S. Luryi, G. Belenky, F. Towner, J. D. Bruno, C. Monroy, and R. L. Tober

4.6    D. Botez, M. D’Souza, G. Tsvid, A. Khandekhar, D. Xu, J. C. Shin, T. Kuech, A. Lyakh and P. Zory

4.7    M. A. Green

4.8    N. N. Ledentsov, V. A. Shchukin, and D. Bimberg

4.9    E. Paspalakis, M. Tsaousidou, and A. F. Terzis