Hewlett Packard created a photonic processor with thousands of components on a chip

Currently, the flow of electrons is used to transmit and process information, but a constant increase in the complexity of the calculations suggests that modern techniques will soon be insufficient and the electrons would be well replaced by something else. Photons, which have much higher speed, are suitable for this as well as possible. A group of researchers from the laboratory of Hewlett Packard managed to create an optical processor, on the chip of which there are 1052 optical components, capable of quickly and efficiently performing fairly complex calculations.

The principle of operation of the optical processor is based on a model that determines the interaction of the magnetic fields of individual atoms. This model assumes that each of the atoms rotates, and the direction of its rotation can indicate "up" or "down". In ferromagnetic materials located at a temperature above a certain point, the directions of rotation of the atoms are oriented chaotically due to their thermal oscillations. However, when the temperature is lowered, the interactions between the atoms begin to come to the fore and their direction of rotation is ordered, orienting in a certain direction.

Elements of optical processor

If we talk about the structure of the chip, then it created 4 computing nodes that operate with infrared light. The stream of light emerging from each node passes through a series of separators, interacting with light emanating from other nodes. According to the authors of the study from the laboratory of Hewlett Packard,

"The program that determines the computational operations performed by the optical processor is coded in the form of temperatures of a plurality of heaters responsible for the operation of the individual elements. The light that has passed through processing and mixing with light from other computing nodes passes through the micro-ring resonators, where it is cleared of interference and returns to the computer node, which changes its state, changing again the phase of the light emerging from it. And this happens so long as the whole system does not find a balanced state, which will be the solution of the task. "

Such processors can not yet act as an element of a full-fledged computer, but they can serve as accelerators when performing certain tasks, for example, processing computer graphics algorithms or processing another large data set.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/hewlett-packard-sozdali-fotonnyj-processor-s-tysyachej-komponentov-na-chipe.html.