The researchers claimed that perovskite-based light-emitting diodes, namely LEDs, could be the key to developing much faster internet bandwidth than currently available, while keeping energy consumption and cost low.
Perovskite is a natural mineral first identified in the Ural Mountains of Russia in 1839 and consists mainly of calcium, titanium and oxygen. And all of them are one of the 10 most common elements in the Earth’s crust. The mineral gives its name to a class of materials based on the same elements but doped with small amounts of other elements. For almost the first two centuries after their discovery, perovskites were largely a curiosity, intrigued only by chemists.
Recently, however, perovskites’ ability to display different electrical properties depending on the atoms they are incorporated into has made them a wonderful material. Perovskites are now one of the most efficient ways to extract energy from sunlight and continue to evolve. What’s more, while perovskites have the potential to be produced much more cheaply than traditional silicon-based solar cells, a layer of perovskites placed on a silicon base alone can shed more light.
Ten years ago, when the light-scavenging potential of perovskites was announced to the world, it was also noted that they could offer better ways to diffuse light by providing more efficient and flexible LEDs. While this may seem like an afterthought for a planet in the midst of a climate and energy crisis, the fact that our LED TV screens need less power to illuminate is an obvious win.
However, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Surrey have shown that the capabilities of perovskite LEDs may be more than an afterthought.
The researchers announced that they have produced metal-halide perovskite LEDs that produce modulation bandwidths of 42.6 MHz and data transmission rates of more than 50 Mbps. Moreover, they think that this is just the beginning and that bandwidths in the gigahertz range are possible.
For decades, physicists have seen photonics as the future of data processing, replacing electrons with photons that literally travel at the speed of light. However, this has proven to be more difficult to achieve in practice than expected.
Velocities are limited more by the capacity of the transmitting devices than by the movement of information-carrying photons. However, the team thinks the lightning-fast switching capacity of perovskite LEDs could provide much-needed progress. Perovskites can also be embedded in substrates, including silicon chips, and integrated directly into processing devices.
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