New Material Sets Stage For All-Optical Computing 53
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.
Similar stuff from IBM (Score:3, Interesting)
...And the same news from Semiconductor Intl [semiconductor.net].
Optocouplers (Score:4, Interesting)
Power & Heat (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Probably not much to see here, at least yet (Score:3, Interesting)