Seeking to Innovate?

Accelerate your company's innovation capacity
[CONTACT US]

INNOVATION RESOURCES

Cooler and Faster Computing

Breakthrough:
Faster computing could be on the way following the discovery of new behaviors of light within photonic crystals. University of Toronto quantum optics researchers Sajeev John and Xun Ma designed a vacuum inside a photonic crystal in which light passes through circuit paths that are one-hundredth of the thickness of human hair.

Business:
University of Toronto, Canada

The Story:
Cooler and Faster Computing

John and Ma found they could completely control the electronic state of artificial atoms within the vacuum. This not only leads to the processing of optical information at faster speeds, but could also bring about compact computers that don’t overheat.

“This discovery can enable photonic computers that are more than a hundred times faster than their electronic counterparts, without heat dissipation issues and other bottlenecks currently faced by electronic computing," says Ma whose study was published in ‘Physical Review Letters’.

Seeing the Light

Optical computing has been proposed as the potential future of information processing, by using photons of light as the information carrier instead of electrons moving down a wire. Photons are much faster than electrons and light does not produce the considerable amounts of heat that are generated when electric currents are used. Proponents of optical computing believe that it will offer high speeds at low energy that will far outstrip current electronic chip designs.

Multiple Channels

The mechanism devised by the two Toronto-based scientists enables optical transistors to perform logic operations over multiple frequency channels in trillionths of a second and at energy levels that are equivalent to one millionth of the power required by a light bulb. The scientists claim that this computing over many wavelengths as opposed to electronic circuits that only use one channel would far exceed the performance of current electronic transistors.

[NEXT STORY]

IdeaConnection: What Can we Solve for You?

Become a
Paid Problem Solver