New Photonic Chip: x1000 faster

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
03:16 - Lithium Niobate
05:56 - How does this chip work?
08:23 - Criticism

[bbasmdc]

A few corrections. The entire optical transmission industry uses infrared light, typically centred around 1550nm. Silicon is perfectly transparent at these wavelengths and is an excellent optical semiconductor for some functions. The concept of the photonic integrated circuit (PIC) dates back to a Bell Labs paper in 1969 and companies like Infinera have been building PIC-based optical transmission equipment based on indium phosphide since 2005. Even the original PIC chips from Infinera have over 200 individual optical elements integrated. Lithium niobate is an excellent optical semiconductor as a modulator but there is very limited experience of using it in a PIC. Perhaps the main challenge of scaling the number of components on a single chip (be it electrical or optical) is the killer defect rate - which is when material faults randomly occur in the chip structure during manufacture. If these defects occur where there is a critical chip function then the chip will not work properly. Once of the major successes of the silicon chip industry is to reduce killer defect rates to allow large die areas with acceptable killer defect rates. Indium phosphide is maybe a decade behind silicon in this respect, but lithium niobate is twenty or thirty years behind silicon. Companies like IBM and Intel have poured billions of dollars into silicon photonics so I would still put my money on silicon winning the race - even though it's not an ideal semiconductor for optical computing given that it cannot not work as an electrically pumped laser (silicon is an indirect bandgap semiconductor).

[FiglioBastardo]

I could listen to you breakdown super intense subjects that I'll never really need in my lifetime, forever! Your approach and ease of translating things into near layman's terms is great. Grazie mille Anastasia.

[TickerSymbolYOU]

This is absolutely HUGE. Photonics needs way more coverage. Great breakdown of the paper!

[steveseidel]

I remember writing a paper on optical computing back in the late 80's. There were high hopes back then. Not much has happened in this space since that time. It's encouraging to see some progress.

[monad_tcp]

This is an amazing way of injecting a lot of data into a silicon microchip so you can actually have faster processing. Heck, we can even bring back ring-loops as memory, store it at the GHz range inside a loop of optic fiber. Terabytes of memory faster than DRAM.

Forget about using it for computing, just moving data and storing data are already amazing. Modern CPU/GPUs already spend most of their time just waiting for data to come to their caches. The rate at which computing can happen is severely restricted by memory and bandwidth speeds.

[lasselasse]

TBH as a programmer, I don't understand your domain well enough to understand everything you teach.
But I am curious, and the main takeaway for me from your presentations in general is that it's very inspirational. You have a very good way of explaining things. Thank you for that!

[WildEngineering]

we dont have electronics that can feed an optical encoding device in THz speeds, thats why theyre using microwave encoding. Its the fastest we can transmit data using conventional computers to encode the optical signal. The optical signal is the carrier and the radio signal is the modulator. The only reason they are converting to light is because they can optimize certain computations (like matrix multiplication and fourier series) natively due to the innate physics of the system that is designed. This is essentially an analog signal with no discrete values which makes repeatability a bit of a challenge due to things like chaos theory. It would be cool to see some sort of optical transistor that can be switched easily with optical logic gates and possibly do discrete calculations instead of analog ones.

[Scriabin_fan]

You remind of one of my old professors. She was an older woman and she was a wonderful professor and I'm very fond of her. She taught Data Structures and algorithms. Thanks for the breakdown of this. It's very clear and understandable.

[IakobusAtreides]

Was looking forward to your take on this paper. Thank you 🙏

[jimg]

I have been saying photonics is the ultimate in processing for 20 years, finally good to sees it's starting to take hold.

[id]

There have been recent breakthroughs in
1 AI
2 Quantum
3 Photonics
Now imagine an AI running on a Photonic Quantum computer!
It would make all our existing computers as useful as handheld calculators.

[Techmagus]

Sentences like silicon is black and therefor does not work for optical computing with visual lights is true, but in IR silicon is transparent and in that range silicon is working well for optical computing.

[siyabongampongwana]

I think the next age of innovation is sort of dependant on breakthroughs in Material Sciences, it is the key that will unlock a whole lot and every thing will just fall in to place and we will move faster and much further.

[yoyo-jcqg]

This is crazy technology if they can master it, because of lights ability to be split into different wavelengths or colors this will significantly increase data storage and speed, it'll turn silicon valley into the stone age

[ShivMathur]

Chip advancement is actually an amalgamation of many technologies. Especially the material science and integration of optics and quantum computing I guess

[perryharovas]

As ALWAYS, excellent content, incredibly complex ideas described simply and thoroughly. These videos are essential and I thank you for making them!

[bbamboo]

Good to see a sober assessment of the developments. Eager to see systems that exploit the full parallelism possible with optical computing.

[zenmasterjay]

Anastasi... You and your videos are so wonderfully informed.

[ElCalorDelUniverso]

By the way, what a wonderful content you are sharing in such a simple and very explanatory way! Thank you!🙏🏽

[OgnjenKrejovic]

Thank you for all this incredible informations and on your way of presentation of everything, greetings from Bosnia.