Streaming videos online with the quality of high-end home theater systems and computer programs running a thousand times faster are some of the things that may be possible with research advances being made by a team led by Dr. Tony Jun Huang, the James Henderson assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. Tony’s Biofunctionalized NanoElectroMechanicalSystems (BioNEMS) group has developed a working plasmonic switch, the first step in building optical computers with frequencies 100,000 times greater than the ones of current microprocessors. Dr. Huang explained, "Computer chips have circuits.
Today's electronic circuits are good and small, but they're slow and have low capacity, relatively speaking. To make the big jump, we need to develop photonic circuits. Photonic circuits use light to carry information, similar to the technology behind fiber optic cables, and have higher speeds and higher capacities. But the problem with photonic circuits is that they're too big."
The answer, Tony said, is to create something that combines the speed and capacity of photonic circuits with the small size of electronic circuits -- a plasmonic circuit.

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**Source: Penn State Live