In the never-ending race to create faster, more powerful microchips, the tech industry is increasingly running up against a challenging bottleneck. Microchips use electricity to communicate with each other, but electrical signals are relatively slow and inefficient. Trying to make computers faster by increasing chip speeds would take so much electrical power the chips would fail—or even melt.
Mark Wistey, associate professor in the Department of Physics at Texas State University, envisions a way to sidestep this problem, by having microchips use lasers to communicate.
Lasers can be used to efficiently transmit tremendous amounts of data very quickly, at a fraction of the heat and energy cost associated with wires and electricity. But laser communication has never been cost effective at such a small scale and that presents unique challenges.
