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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.
"five times faster than current technology." Reminds me of being a teenager and discovering lotion...
Yes, its true, transmission speeds and routing capacity are usually measured in bits rather than megs or kb. (this probably has something to do with the whole kb/mb doesn't follow powers of ten thing)
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.
Exactly, like lower latency. The conversion into an electrical signal, and then back to optical probably adds a bit of latency. I'm no expert, but I'd imagine that data going to and from a typical destination on the internet goes through several of these conversions adding (in most cases negligible) latency. If most of the routers on the net were all optical, I'd imagine we'd have an internet with imperceptible latency most of the time. That could lead to things as simple as lag-free gaming, real-time video conferencing, and maybe in the future a very (sur)real shared virtual reality, all done across large physical distances.
Probably has more to do with the fact that historically some hardware had byte and word sizes that weren't multiples of 8.
E.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit
Of course. Because the new technology also is getting better. And usually at a much quicker rate than the existing one, because that one is already at the end of its limits.
There often even is new technology that is still worse than the old one, because of its experimental state. But worth pursuing anyway, because of the huge potential.
The same is true for optical circuits.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Gah I hate these lame random units .. gigabits/second.
Could somebody translate that to a more standard Libararies of Congress/fortnight please.
The first automobiles could easily be outrun by a horse. I guess we're fortunate that no one noticed that or else they would've all agreed that automobile technology was a waste of time and should be abandoned.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.