Wednesday, June 15, 2016

New research from Yale uses sound to amplify light on a silicon chip.  That likely sounds esoteric and meaningless, but the Internet runs on a backbone of optical cables.  When signals get routed they currently convert signals to electricity to determine the routing and convert signals back to light to run on an optical cable.    Logic gates using light have been invented, but with no way to amplify the light they are of little use.  This invention could remove that inefficient conversion to electricity leading to improvements on the backbone of the Internet.  Details are here: http://news.yale.edu/  (There is a way to amplify light in an optical cable using lasers but I don't think that technique works on a chip.  Passive optical amplifiers ref: http://www.fiberopticshare.com/)

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