Photonic processor heralds new computing era

Current computing relies on electrical current passed through circuitry on ever-smaller chips, but in recent years this technology has been bumping up against its physical limits.

To facilitate the next generation of computation-hungry technology such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, researchers have been searching for new methods to process and store data that circumvent those limits, and photonic processors are the obvious candidate.

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Featuring scientists from the Universities of Oxford, Münster, Exeter, Pittsburgh, École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) and IBM Research Europe, the team developed a new approach and processor architecture.

The photonic prototype essentially combines processing and data storage functionalities onto a single chip - so-called in-memory processing, but using light.

“Light-based processors for speeding up tasks in the field of machine learning enable complex mathematical tasks to be processed at high speeds and throughputs,” said Münster University’s Wolfram Pernice, one of the professors who led the research.