DeepThoughts On Optical Logic Gates for Ultra-Fast Processing ?

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Optical Logic Gates for Ultra-Fast Processing ?

Researchers from Aalto university in Finland made a breakthrough in optical computing: they've found a way to implement logical gates using the chirality of light – a major research achievement that might lead to super-fast, all-optical computers in the future.

You're probably thinking: 'chirality of light'—what's that? You can think of light in this context as an electromagnetic wave whose electric and magnetic fields twist like a spiral either clockwise or counterclockwise, i.e., having a right-handed or left-handed chirality. The researchers found a material that emits light with a certain chirality depending on the chirality of the light that it absorbs, like a logic gate producing an output depending on the inputs.?

Specifically, they implemented an XNOR gate. Other gates can be implemented by filters or additional optical components, and thus, it provides all the necessary ingredients to build an all-optical chip – which could be potentially a million times faster than state-of-the-art CPUs(!). Read more about this in the original Science publication.?

This is a super exciting development, as most photonics startups focused in the past either on converting photonic to electronic signals (and vice versa) or building analog optical chips, e.g., for deep learning applications. Now, there are the first attempts to implement also logic using photonic components, which might spark another wave of optical computing startups.

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Interesting Reads ??

NEWPhotonics – Shaping the Future of Data Centers Through All-Optical Chips for Digital Signal Processing – An interview by our associate Benjamin on the future of computing blog.

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What is AGI-hard – Solving autonomous driving could be as hard as designing an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that passes the Turing test.

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