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New Material Sets Stage For All-Optical Computing
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times: "Researchers have made a new material that can be used to guide waves of light, a breakthrough that could lead to ultra-fast computing. Georgia Tech scientists are using specially designed organic dyes that can process and redirect light without the need to be converted to electricity first. ... 'For this class of molecules, we can with a high degree of reliability predict where the molecules will have both large optical nonlinearities and low two-photon absorption,' said [Georgia Tech School of Chemistry professor Seth] Marder."
According to the article, using an optical router could lead to transmission speeds as high as 2,000 gigabits per second, five times faster than current technology.
"2000 gigabits per second"
GigaBITs? Wow!
If the best expected performance of the new technology is just 5 times better than current technology, is it really worth pursuing it? Current technology is current, as in real. Best expected performance needs to be divided by a correcting factor which is unlikely to be much lower than 5.
"five times faster than current technology." Reminds me of being a teenager and discovering lotion...
I could not get my eyes from that advertisy pic.
Must...read...article.
EETimes has "IBM Research claimed a keystone achievement in on-chip optical communications Wednesday (March 3), saying its 40-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) germanium avalanche photodetector completes what it calls the nanophotonic toolkit." (link) (A few days before announcing 2,500 layoffs, hmmm...)
...And the same news from Semiconductor Intl.
I'd like to benchmark this against graphene. Since optical signals don't have to be converted to electrical first, then (I think) the bottleneck would be the optoelectronics.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Sure -- its for routers, a basic component of data transmission, and a bit is the most fundamental piece of data. We typically think in "BYTES", but that's really an OS abstraction right? At the lowest level of the network stack it makes sense to talk in bits -- anything above that can interpret it as it will (like a Byte, Word, Long.. etc)
I would consider 3 factors: "need", "current capacity", and "future capacity". "Need" is always increasing, at a rate to overtake "current capacity," therefore "future capacity" needs to always be developed. If they are predicting 5x faster performance at this early stage, it surely holds more. When BluRay was in it's infancy many people said 'why would i ever need 50GB, thats bigger than my HD'--- but low and behold, now 50gb doesn't seem like enough
You mean "Bazinga!"
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
+1 for Georgia Tech, twice in one week (Spanish botnet taken down)
Where did you learn it was an OS abstraction? That's just ... sigh.
Bytes are the smallest addressable unit of memory the CPU can handle. It doesn't matter if the memory controller only does cache line fills or whatever, memory addresses are in units of bytes.
I've been reading headlines for the past 20 years that claim "breakthroughs" in all-photonic computing. Where are the all-photonic routers?
This is a result of the highly-clustered, highly-mobile computing age we live in today. A single fast chip isn't as applicable any more. Give us tiny and low-power.
The big issues in designing optical switches is their switching time and minimum switch pulse width. I and my group built what is probably the first all-optical computer in the early '90s. We used Lithium Niobate switches, which limited the machine's clock frequency of 100 MHz. It's hard to find the original article, which is in the Feb. 18 issue of Science Express. Subscription required, unfortunately. In that article the authors say nothing about switching time, or minimum switch pulse. It looks like a good piece of research, but eons away from anything practical.
Obviously the ramifications as far as emissions security (TEMPEST though that's a simplification of TEMPEST) are huge, but what is this likely to do for heating and component size. I can see this being a great opportunity for a lot of military applications even if the speed limit is only a few times better than what we have now.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Bytes are the smallest addressable unit of memory the CPU can handle. It doesn't matter if the memory controller only does cache line fills or whatever, memory addresses are in units of bytes.
But here we are not talking about normal x86 CPU architecture, but routers that transport various amounts off bits...
It's my understanding that fiber optic cable has speeds that are limited by the electronic conversions on either side. Is that what is the issue here as well? How well could this (for lack of a better term) internal light mesh with an external (fiber optic) light?
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Hmmm, more garbage from academia. Let's see, organic dyes a simple not photostable enough to withstand the high peak power pulses needed to cause these nonlinear affects. I should know spent 4 years of grad school working on similar optical switching system.
Unfortunately, the article didn't hint at this possibility at all. However, I did pick this up:
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
So DARPA's helping fund it eh? In answer to my own question then, "Yes!"
Leave it to DARPA to fund the development of a cloaking device and play it off as a computer breakthrough. I, for one, am stoked.
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Just a guess, but i wouldn't imagine packets are measure in bits but in bytes. That's why hex is often used, right? Unless the router is using an exotic protocol, everything will be measured in bytes? Data structures are almost all in multiples of bytes.. size_of(bool) returns 1. malloc works with bytes, not bits. I'm pretty sure you will have a hard time finding anything that works directly in bits and not bytes, to include routers.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I'm a gamer you insensitive clod!
Smoke and mirrors: A new material that can be used to guide waves of light
Keep Doing Good.