Moore's Law (Moore'sLaw) prediction of integrated chip performance improvement trend has been going on for more than half a century, but even if the technology continues to develop, but the various physical limits will restrict further improvement. Even some scholars believe that the next 10 to 25 years, the traditional computer processing power seems to approach the limit. With the end of Moore's Law research intensified, the major computing chip companies began to explore the use of photons instead of electronic computing methods.
Researchers at Hewlett Packard Labs have built a new optical chip, one of the world's most complex optical chips. Allegedly, the optical chip than conventional chips more efficient and faster to perform optimal computing tasks, the energy consumption and less. lm317dcyr
Note: Moore 's Law (Moore' s Law) is one of Intel 's founder Gordon Moore (Gordon Moore) put forward. The number of transistors that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit doubles every 24 months. The 18-month quotation, often cited by Intel chief executive David House, is expected to double the chip's performance by 18 months (that is, to accommodate more transistors to make it faster) ).
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEESpectrum) report, HP Labs team built an optical device, including 1052 optical components work together, can carry out complex computing tasks.
It's like a light-based IsingMachine. Ising machines often use temperature fluctuations to encode complex computational problems and to find solutions to problems by identifying how the electron spin direction is stable over time under the influence of ambient temperature changes. qpi-5lz
In contrast, HP's new optical chip uses a light beam instead of electrons, using the polarization properties of light to simulate the two spin states of electrons. Likewise, the novel optics solve the problem by coding small heaters and sweeping the beam around the various regions of the chip until the light beam reaches a steady state.
HP Labs Optical Chips, including heating wires, microring resonators, refueling, and optical input / output components.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEESpectrum) detailed description of the optical chip works and technology:
The four areas on the HP Lab Optical Chips are called nodes to support the four spins formed by the infrared beam. When the beam leaves the node, it will be split and combined with the beam from each of the other nodes inside the interferometer. An electric heater built into the interferometer is used to change the refractive index and physical size of nearby components. This will adjust the optical path length of each beam, thereby adjusting its phase with respect to the other beams.
The temperature of the microheater encodes the problem to be solved as this will determine the importance of the spin state of one beam with respect to the spin of the other beam when the two beams are combined. All of these interacting outputs are then condensed and fed back to the individual nodes, where the structure known as the microringresonators will clear the light beam in each node to bring it back to one of the spin states again. The beam traverses the interferometer and each node and flips the spin state between 0 and 180 degrees until a single solution is obtained for the entire system equilibrium.
The researchers said that the method for the optimization of complex problems to solve the efficiency is much higher than the traditional chip. The team exemplifies the classic "travel salesmanproblem" problem, demonstrating that the new optical chip is far more efficient than traditional chips. The "Traveling Salesman" problem is a classic mathematical challenge that requires calculating the most efficient route between multiple points.
In addition, other optical computing techniques have similar advantages. As Suntech recently reported, laser-based computing is being used to analyze genetic data as well as intelligently compressing information, and at a faster rate than traditional computing chips. And, with the speed increase, based on the calculation of the energy consumption of the chip will be less.
The speed, efficiency, and power consumption of optical computing chips explains why chip giants like Intel are also looking at how to build optical computing hardware.
HP Labs' latest research is another milestone in the development of optical computing hardware, which will further promote the optimization of computing problems and improve efficiency.
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