Fast, efficient optoelectronic chips to hit market next year

[Becky]

Some exciting news to brighten your Monday - Ayar Labs, a MIT spin-off company, have been developing a new type of processor that dramatically improves data transmission speeds and energy consumption. The chips use light to transmit data instead of electricity, and according to MIT the first product could hit the market as soon as next year.

Think of a computer as like an air passenger system. If you concentrate on the aircraft, airport runway architecture, supply logistics, and air traffic control, it's easy to speed up travel between, for example, New York and Washington DC to under one hour. That sounds fantastic, but if it takes you two hours to get through security at one hand and another two hours to collect your baggage at the other, then it's faster to drive.

It's the same with computers. Chips may be able to operate at lightning speed, but they still communicate with one another using copper wires that not only slow down the system, they also force the chips to waste energy sitting idle while the data is transferred. As long as the copper wires are there, so is the bottleneck.

Read more about it here.

 

[TriplexDread]

This has been 10years coming. A big step, a shame it's not more

 

[Becky]

Agreed, it's very exciting