Optical, electrical bistability study sheds light on next-gen high speed data transfer

Today, electrical bistable devices are the foundation of digital electronics, serving as building blocks of switches, logic gates and memories in computer systems. However, the bandwidth of these electronic computers is limited by the signal delay of time constants important to electronic logic operations. In an attempt to mitigate these problems, scientists have considered the development of an optical digital computer, and one team has gone so far as to demonstrate the optical and electrical bistability for switching in a single transistor.