[HN Gopher] Corkscrew Optics Yield Direct Line to Electronics
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Corkscrew Optics Yield Direct Line to Electronics
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-12-16 22:49 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| naturedivine wrote:
| Perhaps we can use fewer optical gates and serialize the use of
| gates, using pipelining at gate level.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| Actual paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq8246
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" The new gates performed at speeds of less than 100
| femtoseconds, which is roughly 1 million times as fast as
| electronic gates_"
|
| Electronic gates switching at 10 MHz?
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Yeah, they're off by a factor of 1000.
|
| There are other serious technical errors in the piece too. For
| example they say "because photons move at the speed of light
| and electrons don't" ... which is irrelevant because electronic
| signals do move at the speed of light.
|
| The most serious problem is missing context. It's been known
| for decades that you can build shockingly fast optical switches
| and even amplifiers. A hundred fs is fast but not unique. The
| problem is how to connect these devices in a complicated
| circuit without putting nanoseconds of waveguide in between.
| Unfortunately 1 ns is 1,000,000 fs.
|
| So in telecom, where you're just going a long way in one
| direction, optical amplifiers with multi-THz bandwidth have
| dominated transport since the 1990s. But in computers, no.
| blep_ wrote:
| Electronic signals also do not move at the speed of light:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes they do. It's just that the speed of light differs
| slightly depending on the medium.
| ilyt wrote:
| No, you can have different speed in same copper material.
|
| At least read the fucking link they provided instead of
| saying bollocks...
| amelius wrote:
| 1 femtosecond = 1e-15 seconds.
| perihelions wrote:
| Right, so 100 fs = 1e-13 seconds. And a million times slower
| than that would be 1e-7 seconds, or (10 MHz)^{-1}.
| greenbit wrote:
| Commodity PCs were running 10MHz clocks by 1988, weren't
| they?
| tiagod wrote:
| The point is they now run at several GHz, so their
| comparison is off by orders of magnitude.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Probably just a miscommunication. The actual improvement is
| more like 10K times, but this moves from the 'gigahertz range'
| to the 'petahertz range' which differ by 1e6.
|
| > "Since light oscillates so fast (roughly a few hundred
| million times per second), using light could speed up
| electronics by a factor of roughly 10 000 as compared to
| computer chips," says Tobias Boolakee, a laser physicist in
| Peter Hommelhoff's group at the FAU and the first author of a
| study in Nature on the new gate." (2022)
|
| https://physicsworld.com/a/logic-gate-breaks-speed-record/
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Light oscillates much, much faster than a few hundred million
| times per second. Take 1 micron wavelength. At a speed of 3e8
| m/s, 1 micron light oscillates 3e8/1e-6 = 3e14 times per
| second. Three times ten to the fourteenth power.
|
| For anybody who doesn't juggle large numbers every day, a
| hundred million is 1e8. Ten to the eighth.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Maybe they meant trillions? The 10,000 times faster number
| seems correct though, as fiber optic carries light at
| ~200-300 THz and 10 GHz is the electronic standard at
| present.
| tiagod wrote:
| I remember this exact issue in the last HN front-page article
| about optical gates, weeks ago...
| airstrike wrote:
| Do you have a link? Would love to read that
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