(Editor’s note: This post on photonics is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and scientists.)
While generative AI software is all the rage right now, it can lead us to overlook the physical limitations our data-driven world is up against. Photonics could provide the solutions as well as transforming the way we live, from healthcare to aerospace.
The tech world has thrown its weight behind the generative AI revolution in 2024, with Google being the biggest mover on that front. The big data giant’s major investment in Reddit back in February gave it access to OpenAI’s software on an unprecedented scale, the fruits of which we’re now seeing in the latest Google Core update.
But in the background, there’s also a hardware revolution taking place. It’s drawing little attention, but could be laying the platform for a huge lead forward in computing and telecommunications.
For the past few years, semiconductors have been causing a massive headache for the tech world. It might be good for chip makers and semiconductor-related companies such as Silicon Valley-based giant Nvidia and ASML in the Netherlands that demand is becoming exponentially higher. Yet it’s getting harder and harder to make advances in the performance of computer chips in order to match the need for ever-increasing computing power and speed.
Overcoming electronic barriers
The price of this technology has jumped in part simply due to the inability of production to keep up with the explosion of demand, in addition to wider economic and geopolitical factors. The physical limitations of electronic chips is also an important reason, though, and will become the main factor holding back the next stage of data and computing development over time.
Photonics offer a way around the barriers that electronic chip elements ultimately impose. They open up the possibility of increasing computer processing and information transfer rates to something comparable with the speed of light. Light waves travel hundreds of times faster than the electric currents presently forming the basis of most computing.
Optical transceivers, the “circuit boards” of photonic-based computing, can work at speeds inconceivable for the developers of even the most advanced electronic chips. As Berlin-based doctor of physics and contributing editor of Photonics Spectra Andreas Thoss explains, “400G devices exhibit 100× higher clock rates than the central processing units (CPUs) in a regular office computer.”
How will photonics be used?
The main application for these transceivers in the short term will be data storage and transfer on an industrial scale, allowing large computer servers to run at completely different levels from their historical capabilities. In this way, photonics will revolutionise the speeds at which information can be processed and shared, opening up new avenues for software development.
We’ll see photonics play a key role in communications and connectivity, too. Just as fibre-optic cables have already turned the internet into a different beast, the further development of light-based telecommunication will push the boundaries of what’s possible in all forms of media and industrial technology.
An array of applications
And we’re already seeing photonics play a role in healthcare, for instance in disease diagnosis and treatment. Most photonics developers have made biotech a key priority, given the enormous potential for biophotonics to benefit humanity. Earlier this year, the Dutch company Amazec Photonics received the green light on funding to develop a photonic device that detects heart failure.
The Netherlands is an important centre for the photonics industry, with long-established Eindhoven VC PhotonVentures, a spinout of PhotonDelta, the driver behind a 60 million euro investment in 15 photonics startup across Europe last year. Elsewhere on the continent, Barcelona-based Deep Detection is using photon technology to develop defect-detection systems for a range products and machinery, from food and drink to motor vehicles.
The sheer breadth of applications for photonics is unimaginable. Not even the sky’s the limit, when you consider how the industry is even advancing satellite communication.
AI software might be grabbing the headlines at the moment, but photonics is preparing the ground for a brave new world of conduction-free communication. We’re already seeing the first shoots of this process surfacing in certain advanced industry subsectors. Expect it to become the norm over the coming decades.
Alex Beaton
Alex Beaton is a writer from London, UK. His published works include a guide to starting a business in Warsaw, a fictionalised account of his time living in Egypt, and a 2013 report of the political situation in Bulgaria. He has also written extensively about his travels in France, Portugal, Italy and Malta.
