Optical chips moving light rather than electrons herald arrival of silicon photonics

摘要

Watches tick in seconds. Basketball games are timed in 10ths of a second, and drag racers in 100ths. Computers used to work in milliseconds (1,000ths), then moved up to microseconds (millionths), and now are approaching nanoseconds (billionths) for logic operations - and picoseconds (trillionths!) for the switches and gates in chips.