How is the optical switching power needs being addressed?
Last I heard, you needed a high-powered laser on a non-linear material to turn transmission of a separate light signal on/off. Is that how things still work?
Last I heard, you needed a high-powered laser on a non-linear material to turn transmission of a separate light signal on/off. Is that how things still work?
Their hope is that by building a chip with lots of generally useful elements, many different industries will find it useful because they can just program the chip to utilize the components they need. (Fig. 6) Instead of computing with this chip, industry and researchers will be more interested in making things like optical transceivers. Having one common, reconfigurable chip that everyone uses would mean it could be mass produced at a lower cost, making research and production of silicon photonic systems more accessible.
At least that's what I've gathered from the paper - I'm definitely not an expert here. In theory I guess you could put optically switched gates in there too to make something more like an electrical FPGA - I'm sure that's long-term goal for the authors.
What we do is using interference to make a switch. More specifically, we use an apparatus called Mach-Zehnder interferometer (combined with a phase shifter) to manipulate the light.