Logic with light Introducing diffraction casting, optical-based parallel computing Research news
Increasingly complex applications such as artificial intelligence require ever more powerful and power-hungry computers to run. Optical computing is a proposed solution to increase speed and power efficiency but has yet to be realized due to constraints and drawbacks. A new design architecture, called diffraction casting, seeks to address these shortcomings. It introduces some concepts to the field of optical computing that might make it more appealing for implementation in next-generation computing devices.
Whether it’s the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop on your desk, all current computer devices are based on electronic technology. But this has some inherent drawbacks; in particular, they necessarily generate a lot of heat, especially as they increase in performance, not to mention that fabrication technologies are approaching the fundamental limits of what is theoretically possible. As a result, researchers explore alternative ways to perform computation that can tackle these problems and ideally offer some new functionality or features too.
One possibility lies in an idea that has existed for several decades but has yet to break through and become commercially viable, and that’s in optical computing. Essentially, optical computing leverages the speed of light waves and their ability to interact in complex ways with different optical materials without generating any heat. Add to this the fact that a broad range of light waves can pass through materials simultaneously without affecting each other and you can in theory produce a massively parallel, high-speed and power-efficient computer.
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