A tiny LED just set a speed record on 25 milliwatts — a sip of power for data centres

Data centres move information as light, and the light sources are thirsty. Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Notre Dame shrank gallium nitride micro-LEDs — down to two micrometres across — and found the sweet spot where a device can flicker at 2.75 gigahertz, a record for its class of quantum-well LEDs, while drawing just 25 milliwatts. That is a laboratory device, not a product, and the record describes how fast the light can respond rather than a full communications system. But a faster light that sips power is exactly the direction energy-hungry computing needs. The work appears in IEEE Electron Device Letters.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation