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New Optical Switch up to 1000x Faster Than Transistors - IEEE Spectrum

spectrum.ieee.org · 510 words · saved by 1 readers

“Optical accelerator” devices could one day soon turbocharge tailored applications

A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's leading commercial electronic transistors, research that may one day help lead to a new generation of computers based on light instead of electricity, say scientists in Russia and at IBM. Computers typically represent data as ones and zeroes by switching transistors between one electric state and the other. Optical computers that replace conventional transistors with optical switches could theoretically operate more quickly than regular computers, as photons travel at the speed of…

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