Optical integrated circuits

[HAL9000]

(inverse fourier transform, is a bit like the old school graphic equilizer displays found in hi-fi's



working at 10 trillion times higher frequency and much, much finer resolution. It uses this information to correct the output)


Australian universities claim to be have made a significant step toward making optical integrated circuits. Instead of a tiny circuit using electricity to make calculations, the plan is to use light instead of electricity, some possible uses..

Reliable tuning of photonic chips opens up many other applications, such as optical correlators, which can almost instantaneously find patterns of data in data streams, such as images

modern optical fibres can have a number of seperate frequencies, each frequency can be a seperate stream of data. It's called Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), according to wikipedia it can support 160 channels, an optical integrate circuit could rapidly tune to the desired frequency

Rather than searching for a setting, akin to tuning in an old radio, the researchers could tune the chip in one step enabling the quick and reliable switch of data streams from one destination to another.

other applications..

• Safer driverless cars capable of instantly interpreting their surroundings.
• Enabling AI to more rapidly diagnose medical conditions.
• Making natural language processing even faster for apps such as Google Homes, Alexa and Siri.
• Smaller switches for reconfiguring optical networks that carry our internet to get data where it’s needed faster.

World's first self-calibrated photonic chip: An interchange for optical data superhighways

Research led by Monash and RMIT Universities in Melbourne has found a way to create an advanced photonic integrated circuit that builds bridges between data superhighways, revolutionizing the connectivity of current optical chips and replacing bulky 3D-optics with a wafer thin slice of silicon.

phys.org