On December 24th 2015, researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkley, announced that they had made a breakthrough in optical computing. They've created a new micro processing chip that uses light instead of electricity to transfer data, allowing it to do so at rapid speed, while using small amounts of energy.
The micro processing chips of today's supercomputers, desktops, laptops, and tablets use electricity to communicate and transfer information. As processors become smaller, getting down to the scale of an electron has proven to be a limitation. This is due to the unpredictable nature of the quantum world. To overcome this problem, the researchers discovered that light can be sent across longer distances using the same amount of power.
Milos Popovic, an assistant professor in CU-Boulder's Department of Energy Engineering, says that an advantage of using light is that it can be sent over the same optical fiber as that which is used in the internet backbone. He say's that the infrared light that they use is less than a micron, which allows for dense packing of communication ports on chips, giving them a bandwidth of up to 300 gigabits per second per square millimeter.
The chips can also integrate with traditional electronic components and into the current manufacturing process. The researchers believe that the chip will one day give rise to faster computers for business and personal use.
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