Professor Mitsuru Takenaka and his colleagues have devised a method to drive an optical phase shifter consisting of a compound semiconductor thin film laminated on a silicon optical waveguide with a ferroelectric transistor. By using ferroelectrics as memory, they have realized nonvolatile operation in optical phase shifter that does not lose optical phase information even when the power supply is turned off. This enables the realization of an optoelectronic fusion processor that can be turned on only when necessary, leading to faster and more power-efficient operations required for applications such as generative AI, which requires a huge amount of operations. The paper on this achievement was published online in the German scientific journal “Laser & Photonics Reviews” on October 6.
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