Our ability to cram ever-smaller transistors onto a chip has enabled today’s age of ubiquitous computing.
Our ability to cram ever-smaller transistors onto a chip has enabled today’s age of ubiquitous computing. But that approach is finally running into limits, with some experts declaring an end to Moore’s Law and a related principle, known as Dennard’s Scaling.
Those developments couldn’t be coming at a worse time. Demand for computing power has skyrocketed in recent years thanks in large part to the rise of artificial intelligence, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Now Lightmatter, a company founded by three MIT alumni, is continuing the remarkable progress of computing by rethinking the lifeblood of the chip. Instead of relying solely on electricity, the company also uses light for data processing and transport. The company’s first two products, a chip specializing in artificial intelligence operations and an interconnect that facilitates data transfer between chips, use both photons and electrons to drive more efficient operations.
Read more at: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Caption:Lightmatter’s Passage chip interconnect takes advantage of light’s latency and bandwidth advantages to link processors in a manner similar to how fiber optic cables use light to send data over long distances. Sending information between chips is central to running the massive server farms that power cloud computing and run AI systems like ChatGPT. (Photo Credit: Courtesy of the researchers. Edited by MIT News)
