All-optical switches and memories fabricated on a silicon chip using photonic crystal nanocavities

Silicon fabrication technologies are now highly sophisticated, and fusion with high-performance silicon complementary metal oxide semiconductor chips has become more promising. extremely low-losswaveguides and very high quality factor optical nanocavities have been fabricated on a chip using two-diemnsional photonic crystals. An ultra-small high-Q nanocavity significantly reduces the operating energy when it is used as an optical switching device. All optical switches and memories that operate with an energy of about 100 fJ at a switching speed of less than 100 ps can be cascaded using waveguides.