photonic nonvolatile memory chip tagged posts

A schematic of the device, showing its structure and the propagation of light through it. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford

The device, which makes use of materials used in CDs and DVDs, could help dramatically improve the speed of modern computing. Today’s computers are held back by the relatively slow transmission of electronic data between the processor and the memory. ‘There’s no point using faster processors if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to-and-from the memory — the so-called von-Neumann bottleneck,’ explains Professor Harish Bhaskaran.

Simply bridging the processor-memory gap with photons isn’t efficient, though, because of the need to convert them back into electronic signals at each end...