Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Fiber-optic cables package everything from financial data to cat videos into light, but when the signal arrives at your local data center, it runs into a silicon bottleneck. Instead of light, computers run on electrons moving through silicon-based chips, which are less efficient than photonics. To break through, scientists have been developing lasers that work on silicon. Researchers now write that the future of silicon-based lasers may be in quantum dots.
![artist rendering of quantum dot-enhanced laser light emitted from silicon chip](https://engineering.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_left/public/images/news/quantum_dots_photonics_web.jpg?itok=EgBctyI7)