Optical Information Processing on Chips

April 2nd, 2014 by

Researchers from Ghent University in Belgium have created a small 16-node neural network in a silicon photonics chip. This chip is made ​​using the same technology as traditional computer chips but uses light instead of electricity as information carrier. The goal in using light rather than electricity is the potential for high speed (up to several hundreds of Gbits/second or more) and low power consumption. The researchers have experimentally shown that the chip can be used for a diverse range of tasks such as Boolean logic operations, classification and regression, and limited speech recognition of digits.

Source: Ghent University