
Photonic chips can calculate the optimal shape of light to pass through an environment efficiently. These chips can work in pairs to automatically calculate the shape of a light beam. They can also produce multiple overlapping beams with different shapes. This can increase transmission capacity, which is important for next-generation wireless systems.
The research was conducted by Politecnico di Milano, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, the University of Glasgow, and Stanford University. The study was published in Nature Photonics.
Photonic chips are small silicon chips that work as smart transceivers. They combine two or more photonic functions into a single chip. This makes them smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient.
Photonics is a branch of optics that involves the generation, detection, and manipulation of light. It’s closely related to quantum electronics, which deals with the theoretical part of photonics
A study by Politecnico di Milano, conducted together with Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, the University of Glasgow and Stanford University, and published in Nature Photonics, has made it possible to create photonic chips that mathematically calculate the optimal shape of light to best pass through any environment, ..
Photonic chips are laser-powered devices that use photons to process and transmit information at the speed of light. They can be used alone or with traditional electronic circuits
Photonic chips have many advantages over electronic chips, including:
- Calculation speed: Photonic chips are about 1,000 times faster than electronic chips.
- Energy efficiency: Photonic chips can deliver increased performance and energy efficiency in data centers.
- Immunity: Photonic chips are immune to electromagnetic interference, electrical short circuits, and ground loops.
- Safety: Photonic chips are safe in combustible environments.
- Security: Photonic chips are secure from monitoring.
Photonic chips have many uses, including:
- Data-heavy technologies
- Artificial intelligence
- Large and complex AI workloads
- High-capacity data transmissions
Some advantages of photonic systems include: Low-loss transmission, Large bandwidth, Small size, Light weight, Inexpensive.
Electronic chips use electricity, while photonic chips use light signals. Light can travel faster and farther than electricity without losing signal strength.
Electronic chips have the following advantages:
- Size: Small size, weight, and low power consumption
- Reliability: Improved reliability due to construction
- Speed: Improved operating speed due to higher switching speeds
Photonic chips have the following advantages:
- Bandwidth: High bandwidth
- Energy consumption: Low energy consumption
- Speed: High speed
- Size: Small size, weight, and low power consumption
- Reliability: Improved reliability
Other advantages of photonic chips include:
- Batch fabrication economy
- Expanded frequency (wavelength) division multiplexing
- Low-loss couplers
- Expanded multipole switching
Photonic chips are used in many fields, including:
Automotive, Medical, Communication systems, Data communications, Sensing, Biomedical applications, Defense and aerospace industries, Astronomy.
Some specific applications of photonic chips include:
Autonomous driving, Speech recognition, Image recognition, Medical diagnosis, Virtual reality, Digital cloud platforms, Lab-on-a-chip devices, Telecommunications, Sensor technology, Metrology.
Photonic chips are also used in:
- Optical data recording
- Fiber optic telecommunications
- Laser printing
- Displays
- Optical pumping of high-power lasers
- Communications
- The Internet of Things
- Aerospace
- Healthcare
- Clean energy
Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are fabricated on a variety of materials, including:
- Semiconductors: Indium phosphide (InP), silicon, and silicon nitride (SiN)
- Compound semiconductors: Indium phosphide (InP)
- Nonlinear crystal materials: Lithium niobate (LiNbO3)
- Dielectric materials: Silica
Indium phosphide is the most commonly used material for photonic integrated circuits. It allows for the integration of various optically active and passive functions on the same chip.
Silicon photonics (SiPh) is a material platform that uses silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers as the semiconductor substrate material. Silicon has a high refractive index, which allows for microscopic optical waveguides.
Silicon is used in photonics because of its:
- Electronic and photonic properties
- Semiconducting and transparent properties
- Economic efficiency
- High integration density
- High energy efficiency
- Transparency range
Silicon is already used as the substrate for most integrated circuits. This allows for the creation of hybrid devices that integrate optical and electronic components onto a single microchip(full article source google)
