An innovative new chip developed by Penn Engineers uses light waves instead of electricity for AI calculations, marking a potentially significant leap in processing speeds and energy efficiency.
The chip, based on silicon photonics (SiPh), combines the research of esteemed Pennsylvania professor Nader Engheta on manipulating nanoscale materials to perform mathematical calculations using light, with the SiPh platform that uses silicon, a cheap and abundant element computer chips.
This revolutionary approach to chip design could potentially overcome the limitations of current chips, which Daily science and technology points out, they still operate on the principles from the dawn of the computer revolution in the 1960s.
Mathematical calculations at the speed of light.
The chip was developed in collaboration with Firooz Aflatouni, associate professor of electrical and systems engineering, whose research group has been at the forefront of nanoscale silicon devices. The team aimed to create a platform for vector matrix multiplication, a fundamental mathematical operation in neural networks, which are the backbone of modern artificial intelligence tools.
The chip design involves varying the height of the silicon wafer in specific regions, allowing light to scatter in specific patterns and allowing the chip to perform mathematical calculations at the speed of light.
The design is reportedly ready for commercial applications and could be adapted for use in GPUs, demand for which has increased due to growing interest in the development of artificial intelligence systems.
In addition to improved speed and reduced power consumption, the chip also offers privacy benefits. Since many calculations can occur simultaneously, there is no need to store sensitive information in a computer's working memory, making a future computer powered by such technology virtually impossible to hack.
The design of the new chip was detailed in an article published in Nature photonics.
