Role of Nanotechnology in an Optical Network
Nanotechnology is being used at all levels of computer technologies, including optical networking. However, the growing field of nano-engineering promises future improvements that may seem like science fiction today. This is especially true for optical technologies, where nanodesign may allow solutions to optical problems that are not solvable with traditional methods.
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Nanotechnology
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Nanotechnology is generally defined as technology measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter. All modern computer chips are designed on the nano scale, with individual circuits on a chip ranging from 60 to 80 nanometers. Optical fiber, by comparison, carries very large amounts of information on a cable that is tiny by human standards, at under 10 micrometers, but this is still thousands of nanometers in width. Computer chips are not created using nano-engineering, instead using high-tech etching methods to create extremely small grooves on a blank substrate that are then filled with conductive metals.
Nano-Engineering
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Nano-engineering builds computing components and other machinery at nanometer sizes from the ground up, by manipulating matter at the atomic level and creating devices that cannot be developed through conventional techniques. For example, computer chip manufacturing is limited by the wavelength of the laser light used, with tighter grooves requiring lasers of narrower wavelengths and much higher energy. There is a ceiling on the number of circuits that can be placed on a chip using conventional methods, but nano-engineering promises the creation of much smaller, and hence much more powerful computing devices.
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Photons and Electrons
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One potential advance in nanocomputing may come from the replacement of the electrons currently used to represent computer information with photons. An electron is one of the basic particles that makes up an atom, and electricity is made of the movement of electrons. A photon, by comparison, is a single quantum of light energy. Photon-based computing would have much lower energy requirements and have higher speeds than electron-based computing, and would require nanoscale mechanisms routing them through a computer system or network.
Applications
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Nanotechnology may also provide a solution to the minimum size scaling issues posed by the lasers used in conventional methods mentioned earlier. Nanolithography would allow much tinier pathways to be carved in a chip substrate, or nano-engineering could be used to build chips at nanoscale from scratch. Developments in nanoarchitecture alongside photonic computing could blur the boundaries between the computer and the network, as the same pulses used to store information within a computer would also be used to move information along the network, where high-powered nanoscale computing devices could offload some of the work currently being handled by computers and routers.
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