Selling chip makers on optical computing
Computer chips that transmit data with light instead of electricity consume much less power than conventional chips, but so far, they’ve remained laboratory curiosities. Professors Vladimir Stojanović and Rajeev Ram and their colleagues in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and Microsystems Technology Laboratory hope to change that, by designing optical chips that can be built using ordinary chip-manufacturing processes.“I don’t see anyone else that’s doing that,” says Michael Watts, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who’s also working on optical chips. “If they’re successful at that, then convincing a major processor or memory manufacturer that this is a viable approach will be much, much easier.”Granted access to the same manufacturing facilities that Texas Instruments uses to produce cell phone chips and microprocessors, the MIT researchers have demonstrated that they can put large numbers of working optical components and electronics on the same chip. But so far, the electronics haven’t been...