Optical chip-to-chip connections will definitely be a factor in Cisco’s next-generation ASICs, and the company already has the technology working in the lab, Ward told Light Reading.
via Light Reading – Cisco Goes Inside With Silicon Photonics.
Tag Archives: photonic circuits
Fabbing a chip that could encode data in a twisted vortex of light
Photons possess a number of quantum properties that can be used to encode information. You can think of photon polarization as like the rotation of a planet on its axis. In this view, the helical shape of the light wave—known as its orbital angular momentum (OAM)—is akin to the planet’s orbit around the Sun. These properties are independent of each other, and of the wavelength of light, so they can be manipulated separately. Whereas polarization occurs as a combination of two possible orientations, the OAM theoretically can have infinite values, though in practice far fewer states are available. Nevertheless, exploiting OAM greatly expands the potentially exploitable quantum states of photons we could put to use.
via Fabbing a chip that could encode data in a twisted vortex of light | Ars Technica.
Penn Researchers Make First All-optical Nanowire Switch
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of computer chips that process information.
via Penn Researchers Make First All-optical Nanowire Switch | Penn News.
The researchers were able to measure the intensity of the light coming out of the end of the second nanowire and to show that the switch could effectively represent the binary states used in logic devices.
Soton boffins embed electronic components into optical fibres
Rather than trying to merge flat chips with round optical fibres, the team of scientists used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials layer by layer directly into tiny holes in optical fibres. This bypasses the need to integrate fibre-optics onto a chip, and means that the data signal never has to leave the fibre.
via Soton boffins embed electronic components into optical fibres – Techworld.com.
Meanwhile, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in Novemebr that they had developed photonic chips that use light beams rather than electrons. The arrival of photonic computers could help speed traffic across fibre optic networks by eliminating a conversion process, the researchers said.
MIT creates diode for light, makes photonic silicon chips possible
In the near term, though, garnet-on-silicon chips are likely to be used in networking — first in backbone routers, which are physically huge and very power hungry because of the current size of optical switching hardware, and then hopefully at home and in the office (100Gbps home networks!) Then, once the size of MIT’s diode for light is scaled down — it’s currently around 400nm long, some 20 times larger than a transistor — we might begin to see photonic circuits in computers.
via MIT creates diode for light, makes photonic silicon chips possible | ExtremeTech.