Chinese scientists have produced what they claim is the world\u2019s first ultra-high-parallel optical computing integrated chip, delivering a theoretical 2,560 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at a 50 GHz optical clock rate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to CGTN<\/a>, the device was built at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is described this week in the journal eLight.<\/p>\n 100-wavelength architecture boosts speed without raising frequency<\/p>\n Conventional optical processors typically move information on a single color or wavelength of light. SIOM\u2019s design instead divides a laser<\/a> into more than one hundred distinctly colored channels, all traveling through the same fingernail-sized chip simultaneously.\u00a0<\/p>\n Project leader Xie Peng likens it to replacing a single-lane road with a hundred-lane expressway, which means that data throughput soars even though the physical footprint and clock speed stay the same.<\/p>\n The trick is made possible by soliton microcomb sources, tiny ring-shaped resonators that split a continuous laser into a series of evenly spaced spectral \u201cteeth.\u201d Each tooth carries an independent stream of bits.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because light does not suffer the resistive heating that plagues electronic circuits, the parallel lanes can run side by side with minimal energy<\/a> loss and little risk of thermal<\/a> bottlenecks.\u00a0<\/p>\n SIOM reports an optical bandwidth wider than 40 nm, low insertion loss, and fully reconfigurable routing, enabling the chip to tackle tasks ranging from image recognition to real-time signal processing.<\/p>\n Potential uses in artificial intelligence and drone swarms<\/p>\n Researchers say the high degree of on-chip parallelism could give artificial intelligence models a power-efficient alternative to today\u2019s graphics-processing units. Neural networks, which rely on many identical mathematical<\/a> operations, map naturally onto the chip\u2019s multi-lane structure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Low latency also makes the technology attractive for edge devices, everything from high-frequency trading servers to drone swarms, where milliseconds count and power budgets are tight.<\/p>\n Beyond AI, the architecture may speed up physics simulations, medical imaging, and other data-heavy workloads that struggle on purely electronic hardware. Han Xilin, an engineer<\/a> on the project, emphasizes that none of these gains required shrinking features or raising the clock: \u201cWe increased the number of lanes, not the speed limit,\u201d he said in remarks reported by CGTN.<\/p>\n Similar breakthrough: pilot line for lithium-niobate photonic chips<\/p>\n While SIOM\u2019s advance centers on an experimental architecture, a different Chinese team reached a manufacturing milestone last week. Shanghai Jiao Tong University\u2019s Chip Hub for Integrated Photonics Xplore (CHIPX) announced the start-up of China\u2019s first pilot production line for thin-film lithium-niobate (TFLN) photonic chips.\u00a0<\/p>\n SCMP reports<\/a> that the six-inch wafers already demonstrate modulation bandwidths above 110 GHz, low optical loss, and weekly iteration cycles, which are typically required far longer in prototype labs.<\/p>\n CHIPX director Jin Xianmin said the line took fifteen years of materials and process development to complete. Though Europe<\/a> and the United States opened smaller photonic fabs earlier, the Chinese facility\u2019s use of brittle but high-performance lithium niobate, and its capacity of 12,000 wafers per year- marks a significant step toward large-scale photonic<\/a> manufacturing on the mainland.<\/p>\n Both announcements highlight the fast pace of optical chip research and production in China this month. Yet each stands on its own: SIOM\u2019s multi-wavelength processor breaks new ground in parallel photonic computing, whereas CHIPX\u2019s pilot line focuses on bringing a different class of photonic devices to market. Together, they add momentum to a field racing to move more information with less electricity, this time, quite literally, at the speed of light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chinese scientists have produced what they claim is the world\u2019s first ultra-high-parallel optical computing integrated chip, delivering a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3164],"tags":[16536,33300,3284,79646,79647,79648,79649,79650,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-195939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-chinese","9":"tag-chip","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-optical-computing","12":"tag-photon","13":"tag-photonic-chip","14":"tag-photonic-processor","15":"tag-processing","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114707587652339534","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}