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IBM has demonstrated a chip that can take advantage of photonics' higher bandwidth and lower energy consumption:
Engineers have long known that fibre-optic links are more desirable than copper wires for shuttling data around—the available bandwidth is higher, the distances that signals can be squirted over are longer, and energy consumption is lower. On the other hand, when it comes to actually doing stuff with that data, electronics are where it's at. This dichotomy has resulted in a very pronounced split between optical and electrical technologies: optics are used for networking between computers, but inside the chassis it's electronics all the way.
This approach has worked well so far, but as bandwidth and energy requirements continue to soar, research labs around the world have been looking at ways of bringing the optics ever closer to the electronics. The first step is to bring optical channels onto the motherboard, then onto the chip package, and ultimately onto the die so that electrical and optical pathways run side-by-side at a nanometer scale.
Quantum computing has also made a lot of gains recently. Perhaps in 5 years we'll be looking at a higher order of magnitude in processing power. What would you do with it?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:50PM
First, the lasers are currently generated off-chip. Bringing them on-chip is no small hurdle. The features in the picture are already pretty big.
Second, a few lanes, even at high speed, are not about to replace actual on-chip processing lanes and bring us "photonics".
Third, that's standard 90nm Si tech. That pretty cool. But if you're trying to process 800Gb/s, that's not cool at all. I'm not sure it's even possible. Current 400Gb/s demos run on 20nm FPGAs, with a heatsink (you probably will need a heatsink on any ASIC too).
Fourth, by the time they shrink it, they may have to revisit the whole thing to accommodate non-Si, as is the rumored future past 10nm.
So kudos for the chip, but there's a long way to go before it morphs into the light-instead-of-wires dream.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @11:46PM
Someday lasers generated on-chip will be looked at like some of the steampunk shit I saw growing up :D
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday May 15 2015, @12:45AM
First, the [photons] are currently generated off-chip.
do your electronics convert fuel into streams of electrons? why would photonics convert something into streams of photons?