Optical ‘diode’ lends hope to photonic computing, rayguns

The hassle with pesky Photon, no less than so far as ultra-fast optical computing is bothered, is that he keeps coming back. If a knowledge-carrying beam of sunshine collides with reflections bouncing around between the components of a chip, it is able to suffer enough interference to make people yearn for the nice old days of electrons. What’s needed is the optical equivalent of a diode , which only allows light to pass a technique, and that is exactly what researchers at Caltech and the University of California claim to have developed. As you will see inside the photo after the break, their metallic-silicon optical waveguide allows light to travel smoothly from left to right, however it breaks up and dissipates any photons traveling inside the wrong way. That is all good, because there isn’t any point having futuristic 50Gbps optical interconnects if our CPUs lag behind. Remove darkness from the source link for a fuller explanation.

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This post is tagged: fuller explanation, metallic silicon, optical computing, optical waveguide, university of california