How does a photonic computer work?

Bell Labs, USA, 1990.

Launched a laser by the laser.

A computer composed of lenses, mirrors, etc. This was the prototype of the photonic computer. Photonic computers are also known as photobrains. The computer relies on the flow in the electric charge path to process information, while the optical brain relies on the laser beam.

Enter an array of mirrors and lenses to process the information. Similar to computers, light brains also rely on generating a series of logical operations to process and solve problems.

The power of a computer depends on the speed at which its components run and the density at which they are arranged, both of which are ideal for photons. The speed of a photon, or the speed of light, is 300,000 kilometers per second, which is the fastest speed in the universe, and the laser beam can process information up to 1,000 times faster than existing semiconductor silicon devices. Photons do not need to travel in a wire like electrons, they do not affect each other even when light rays intersect, and they do not interfere with each other under the condition that interference is not satisfied.

The non-interference nature of the light beam allows the optical brain to open up many parallel information channels in a very small space, and the density is amazingly large. A prism with a cross-section the size of a 5-cent coin has a passing capacity many times greater than the world's existing ** cables. Bell Labs has developed an optical converter.

2000 channels of information can be loaded into the printed letter O. As a result, electronics engineers have long envisioned the use of photons in computers.

Many key technologies of optical brain, such as optical storage technology, optical interconnection technology, optoelectronic integrated circuits, etc., have made breakthroughs. The application of the optical brain will make a leap forward in the development of information technology.

Categories: Computer Networking.

Problem description: Just curious! What is the essential difference between it and an electronic computer?

Analysis: What is a photonic computer.

At present, the line width of VLSI components has reached the limit value of microns, and further miniaturization is not possible. And the computer's computing speed is *** times per second, which is also close to the limit.

At present, computer technology is facing a new call for revolution. Scientists are pinning their hopes on modern optical technology to develop a new generation of computers, namely photonic computers.

In the process of electron movement, due to the resistance of some impurity atoms, it needs to overcome the resistance generated by some impurities. So, in fact, the speed of electrons in a computer is much lower than the speed of light. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, which is about 1,000 times faster than the movement of electrons in a computer, so it is expected that it is possible to increase the speed of computing by thousands of times.

Photonic computers work on the same principle as electronic computers. The essential difference between them is that the core devices used in the former are no longer traditional electronic devices, but optoelectronic devices. In the photonic computer, optical fibers are used to transmit optical signals, and various optical circuits are composed of various optical elements and logic elements controlled by optical signals, and Qiaokai optical signals are used to realize information storage, calculation and logical judgment.

Different optical signals are transmitted along their own channels or parallel channels without interfering with each other, and although optical fibers are much thinner than wires, one line can transmit many ways of information at the same time. And if there are several signals in the same circuit, the electrons may collide. Therefore, it is possible for the sum stage of photonic computers to process a large amount of data in parallel, and can store information in the form of laser disks, so that the storage capacity can be increased thousands of times.

Scientists expect photonic computers to replace electronic computers in the future, and eventually become a major computer technology.

Photonic computer is a new type of computer that carries out numerical operation, logical operation, information storage and processing by optical signals, and the world's first photonic computer was made by Bell Labs in the United States in the early 1990s.

Photonic computers and DNA computers are both new supercomputers of the future, and their common characteristics are fast computing speed and low energy consumption. We don't know exactly what they will do yet, but these high-performance computers are poised to play a role in the computing of the future.

Compared with electronic computers, optical computers have a very high density of parallel channels for information transmission in "wireless computers". A prism the size of a 5-cent coin in diameter has a passing capacity many times greater than the world's existing ** cables. The parallel and high speed of light naturally determines that the parallel processing ability of optical computers is very strong, and it has ultra-high-speed computing speed.

Ultra-high-speed electronic computers can only work at low temperatures, while optical computers can work at room temperature. Optical computers also have similar fault tolerance to the human brain. Damage or error in a component in the system does not affect the final calculation result.

Protein molecules are much smaller than the electronic components on a silicon wafer and are so close to each other that a biological computer takes only 10 picoseconds to complete an operation, a million times faster than a human mind. The DNA molecule computer has an amazing storage capacity, 1 cubic meter of DNA solution, which can store 1 trillion trillion pieces of binary data. DNA computers consume very little energy, only one billionth of an electronic computer.

Since the raw material of biochips is protein molecules, biocomputers have both self-healing functions and can be directly linked to living organisms.

To put it simply, it is at least 10,000 times higher than the current PC performance, so I hope I can use it in my lifetime.

These are still legendary equipment...

Photonic computers are composed of optical components and devices such as optical mirrors, lenses, and filters. There are two types of photonic computers: analog and digital. Analog photonic computers are characterized by the direct use of the two-dimensional nature of optical images, so the structure is relatively simple.

This photonic computer has been used for satellite** processing and pattern recognition work. The Star Wars program, previously proposed by the United States, intended to develop such a computer to recognize images of missiles flying at high speeds. There are many kinds of structural schemes of digital photonic computers, among which there are two kinds of development value that are considered to be relatively large, one is to adopt the mature structure in electronic computers, but to replace electronic logic elements with optical logic components, and replace wire interconnection with photon interconnection.

The other is a completely new, parallel processing (optical neural network) based structure made in the 80s of this century optical information processing machine, the digital optical processing machine was also successful, it is composed of lasers, open lenses and prisms, etc. Although the photonic computer has been successful, at present, the photonic computer is not as fast as the electronic computer in terms of function and computing speed, and we mainly use electronic computers, and we will also develop electronic computers in the future. However, in terms of the potential for development, it is obvious that the photonic computer is much larger than the electronic computer, especially in the fields of image processing, target recognition, and artificial intelligence, and the photonic computer will play a much greater role in the future than the electronic computer.