A super-fast computing processor that uses light, not
electrons, to perform calculations has gone on sale for the first
time.
Lenslet, the Israeli company that developed the processor, said
its light-speed calculations deliver the power of a supercomputer
in a single device.
The device, called Enlight, can perform 8,000 billion arithmetic
operations a second - about 1,000 times faster than a standard
processor. Previously this type of processor was only available to
highly financed government laboratories, said Lenslet's founder,
Aviram Sariel.
He believes Enlight will be useful across a broad range of
applications, from military projects to compressing high-definition
video images. Sariel acknowledged that Enlight was not a
general-purpose processor. Instead, each processor will be
custom-built to perform a specific set of tasks and will not be
programmable.
Much research has been done to try to exploit the much faster speed
at which light travels compared to electronic signals, but most
commercial work in this area has focused on optical interfaces.
These devices allow fibre optic and related systems to communicate
with traditional electronic systems.
Enlight is a hybrid device, housing both electronic and optical
circuits, but it is the optical processing that makes it so fast.
Sariel said, "It allows you to do a massive level of operations in
parallel."
Derryck Reid, part of the ultrafast optics group at Scotland's
Heriot Watt University, said it may still be some time before we
have fully optical devices. "Fully optical processors are still
very much at the basic component level," he said.
Reid said he has not heard of any other commercially available
optical processors, but he added that with these kinds of hybrid
devices there is a fine distinction between performing calculations
like a processor and processing light signals like a telecoms
switching circuit. The latter are also being developed.
The processing in the Enlight device is carried out using a process
called vector matrix-multiplication, which allows calculations to
be performed on 256 optical inputs.
The beams from 256 lasers are either added or multiplied together
when shone on a matrix device called a spatial light modulator. The
outputs are then read by an array of light detectors.
Lenslet would not put a precise figure on how much an Enlight
processor would cost because each will be made to order, but a
spokeswoman said it would be in the region of tens of thousands of
dollars.
This article first appeared in New Scientist
