According to information released today by computer design firm IBM the company has released information that they have achieved a new technological breakthrough. IBM’s breakthrough centers around the ability of computers to send information between different computer cores on a chip by using pulses of light through silicon as opposed to electricity and wires. The official term for this process is known as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator which turns electrical signals into light pulses. This allows IBM to construct devices 100 to 1,000 times smaller then equivalent modulators.

The upshot of this is that it will equate to a way of placing complete optical routing networks on a solitary chip which, in physical terms, means that it would be possible to have supercomputers that could be placed inside a laptop computer while reducing cost, energy output, and the amount of heat generated. As a matter of contrast today’s supercomputers use enough electrical power to powers large numbers of homes the laptops that are created through this breakthrough would expend the electricital power of a light bulb.

Dr. T.C. Chen, the vice president of Science and Technology of IBM Research stated that “Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today’s on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload.” Dr. Chen also added that the company’s achievement “is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before. In addition Dr. Will Green, the lead IBM scientist on the project, offered the statement that the new technology “is a major advancement in the field of on-chip silicon nanophotonics” that would bring the capabilities of fiber optics to a computer chip.