Posted on 05/18/2015 11:32:22 AM PDT by Red Badger
University of Utah engineers have taken a step forward in creating the next generation of computers and mobile devices capable of speeds millions of times faster than current machines.
The Utah engineers have developed an ultracompact beamsplitter—the smallest on record—for dividing light waves into two separate channels of information. The device brings researchers closer to producing silicon photonic chips that compute and shuttle data with light instead of electrons. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues describe their invention today in the journal Nature Photonics.
Silicon photonics could significantly increase the power and speed of machines such as supercomputers, data center servers and the specialized computers that direct autonomous cars and drones with collision detection. Eventually, the technology could reach home computers and mobile devices and improve applications from gaming to video streaming.
"Light is the fastest thing you can use to transmit information," says Menon. "But that information has to be converted to electrons when it comes into your laptop. In that conversion, you're slowing things down. The vision is to do everything in light."
Photons of light carry information over the Internet through fiber-optic networks. But once a data stream reaches a home or office destination, the photons of light must be converted to electrons before a router or computer can handle the information. That bottleneck could be eliminated if the data stream remained as light within computer processors.
"With all light, computing can eventually be millions of times faster," says Menon.
To help do that, the U engineers created a much smaller form of a polarization beamsplitter (which looks somewhat like a barcode) on top of a silicon chip that can split guided incoming light into its two components. Before, such a beamsplitter was over 100 by 100 microns. Thanks to a new algorithm for designing the splitter, Menon's team has shrunk it to 2.4 by 2.4 microns, or one-fiftieth the width of a human hair and close to the limit of what is physically possible.
The beamsplitter would be just one of a multitude of passive devices placed on a silicon chip to direct light waves in different ways. By shrinking them down in size, researchers will be able to cram millions of these devices on a single chip.
Potential advantages go beyond processing speed. The Utah team's design would be cheap to produce because it uses existing fabrication techniques for creating silicon chips. And because photonic chips shuttle photons instead of electrons, mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets built with this technology would consume less power, have longer battery life and generate less heat than existing mobile devices.
The first supercomputers using silicon photonics—already under development at companies such as Intel and IBM—will use hybrid processors that remain partly electronic. Menon believes his beamsplitter could be used in those computers in about three years. Data centers that require faster connections between computers also could implement the technology soon, he says.
Explore further: Silicon photonics technology ready to speed up cloud and big data applications
More information: An integrated-nanophotonics polarization beamsplitter with 2.4 x 2.4µm2 footprint, Nature Photonics, DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2015.80
Journal reference: Nature Photonics search and more info website
The overhead view of a new beamsplitter for silicon photonics chips that is the size of one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. Credit: Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineering
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-team-big-faster.html#jCp
tech Ping!...............
Imagine what this will do for mobile computing in some finite number of years. Thanks Red Badger.
Add to this gene therepy that makes area of the brain respondant to light and we have a non-invasive brain computer interface.....
I'm not so sure that is a good idea..................
Photonic memory? Sure. One flash drive will be able to hold
Terabytes or more.
Whatever...keep the speed below 50 when going around non super-elevated curves. 186Thousand MPSec OK on the straights.
Photonic memory?
Can Photon Torpedoes be far behind?.....................
We are so screwed.
Pr0n at the speed of light!.................
That is part of the problem. Not sure they’ve solved the memory problem yet (storing & accessing light as bits in memory)—which is the real bottleneck on modern CPUs.
Silicon Photonics on advanced PDK design rules is the next great breakthru.
It will be in servers first as server to server interconnects need to be as fast as possible.
How are you going to store light? I've tried keeping sunlight in a box, but it always leaks out.
Wasn’t the near zero Kelvin capture of light a University of Utah production? Or co-production? They had light going through a near enough to zero Kelvin environment that they could do interesting things with it.
There’s gotta be a connection.
stored (permanent)info need not be light... i.e. permanent being in degrees..
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