Photonics Could Reduce The Cost Of Lidar


Using light to move data over shorter distances is becoming more common, both because there is much more data to move around and because photons are faster and cooler than electrons. Using optical fiber for mission-critical communication is already well established. It has been the preferred PHY for long-haul communications for decades because it doesn’t suffer from the attenuation losses ... » read more

New Standards Push Co-Packaged Optics


Co-packaged optics (CPOs) promise five times the bandwidth of pluggable connections, but the new architecture requires multiple changes to accommodate different applications. The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) recently published standards for co-packaged optics, which are the photonic industry’s hope for handling today’s faster Ethernet interfaces, as well as increasing speeds and p... » read more

CogniFiber: Photonic Computing


Computing with light has many advantages. It's fast, cheap, and it doesn't generate much heat. But it's also difficult to make it work, and it has a number of challenges that are specific to photonics. CogniFiber, an Israeli startup, says it has solved many of these issues. The company uses photonics over fiber, and it has introduced a glass-based chip. “We use light as a data conveyor ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 20


Multiplexing twisted light Researchers from University of California San Diego and University of California Berkeley found a way to multiplex light by using discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings. "It's the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed," said Boubacar Kanté, an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's Department ... » read more

Making Silicon Photonics Chips More Reliable


Silicon photonics has the ability to dramatically improve on-die and chip-to-chip communication within a package at extremely low power, but ensuring that signal integrity remains consistent over time isn't so simple. While this technology has been used commercially for at least the past decade, it never has achieved mainstream status. That's mostly due to the fact that Moore's Law scaling h... » read more