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Oct 29, 2021

Goodbye Transistor? New Optical Switches Offer up to 1,000x Better Performance

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

‘Optical Accelerators’ ditch electricity, favoring light as an exchange medium.


Researchers with IBM and Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute have developed “optical accelerators” — optical switches that use light instead of electricity to convey state changes and transmit information. The inventors claim an up to 1,000x speedup compared to traditional transistor-based switches — and there are applications for both classical and quantum computing.

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