Center for Single Atom Electronics and Photonics

The Center for Single Atom Electronics and Photonics will pursue a new approach for the realization of integrated circuits by integrating opto-electronic components with atomic dimensions.

The external page Werner Siemens-Foundation has donated CHF 12 million to establish the Centre for Single-Atom Electronics and Photonics. ETH Zurich and the external page Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are establishing the centre to develop new types of integrated circuits for communications networks.

As a first step ETH and external page Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will develop new atomic scale opto-electronic blocks for logic and memories. In a second step, a new generation of simple circuit will be realized by integrating the aforementioned building blocks.  A reduction of size by a factor of 100 and energy savings in the order of 1000 compared to establish CMOS devices will be demonstrated.