Towards Integrated Nanoelectronic and Photonic Devices

State of the art nanotechnology appears like a confusing patchwork of rather diverse approaches to manipulate matter at the nanometer scale. However, there are strong economic and technological driving forces behind those developments. One key technology consists of a rather dramatic shrinking of integrated electronic devices towards the very size limits of nanotechnology, just to satisfy the growing demand for commonly available computing power. Furthermore, the corresponding step from microelectronics to nanoelectronics pushes another important technological sector, which aims at the development of novel optical devices, that ought to furnish the bandwidth and speed to ship the plethora of accumulating processing bits. In the following, we point out some of the basic technological challenges involved, and present a selection of experimental and numerical approaches that aim at the development of novel types of optoelectronic nanodevices.