Spasers to Speed Up c-MOS Processors Hundredfold

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Introduction: Rising demand and a high degree of product diversification and innovation in the consumer electronics market has continued to drive the demand for even more efficient CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensors. While the transistors in contemporary CMOS processors can work at speeds up to the limit of their cutoff frequency, the processors themselves work at two orders of magnitude slower speed. This speed has not increased significantly during the last decade, even though a new generation of transistors and processors is produced every two years. This is attributed to the metal interconnect wires in the CMOS processors that occupy most of the processor volume and need to be electrostatically charged. Consequently, they consume most of the electrical energy required for processing and thereby limit the processor speed. A more space- and energy-efficient source of energy for the interconnects that can improve the operational speed of the conventional processors would be extremely beneficial. Technology: A Georgia State University researcher has developed a technology that employs SPASER (Surface Plasmon Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) as a source of energy for high speed plasmon-polariton interconnects in CMOS processors. Instead of electrostatically charging the interconnect wires, nanoscopic SPASER utilizes optical waves over the interconnect wires between transistor pairs of a CMOS processor. As a result, this performance and energy efficient technology increases the speed of CMOS processors by a factor of a hundred as well as decreases their energy consumption and heat production per operation by a similar factor.