Silicon Photonics: The Next Silicon Revolution?

My deepest thanks to friend of the channel Alex Sludds of MIT for suggesting this topic and helping me with critical resources. Check him out here: alexsludds.github.io
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Silicon Photonics. What a cool-sounding word.
If MEMS is the result of applying modern nanoscale CMOS processes to the mechanical world, then doing the same for the optical realm gives us Silicon photonics.
In this video, I want to talk about another magic silicon technology. One that’s starting to make a splash in the contemporary technology world.
Links:
- The Asianometry Newsletter: asianometry.com
- Patreon: / asianometry
- The Podcast: anchor.fm/asianometry
- Twitter: / asianometry

[@Asianometry]

What other silicon photonics topics would you like to see?

[@Extys]

AI chips! I think photonics is very useful for inference in particular. Lightmatter is an MIT photonics AI chips spin-off that everyone is talking about.

[@MickeyMishra]

How this would increase SINAD in modern audio gear and how it would push the performance past 130dB SINAD for just about every consumer level audio device. If optical circuits are used? That takes care of magnetic fields on the traces used in common logic that we use today. It also would make it theoretically immune to Radiation to a point. Especially if you used something like a Quartz crystal or something of the sort of oscillator for the CPU clock timing so that the light could be powered by that so the Logic itself would be immune to much of the interference from space travel. Something like this would be perfect for noisy audio environments. I would also have to say that something like this would also make it so that you would not need to use expensive gold conductors or silver ones as you won't have to worry about metal breaking down over a very long lifetime. I know it's a little bit further than what you were talking about on the video but I thought it would be a good idea to run it by you.

[@peersvensson9253]

There are several startups working on all-optical quantum computation using integrated photonics. Psiquantum and Xanadu are the two most prominent ones.

[@Hassanmohamed31152]

@@Extys I second this and also maybe go over the topic of what makes for efficient chips in a neutral net, like Tesla's new super computer, is he just bullshiting like normal elon or not.

[@gameresearch9535]

I prefer Graphene and "Graphene - Photonics" over silicon. What's better than silicon integrated - Photonics? Graphene - Photonics / carbon nanotubes, and there have been new methods to scale up Graphene since 2020, you just need to research it, some ways are found if you go to my channel to check out all the Graphene playlists, and Graphene - Photonics on the other channel found under my channel called Technology Research, it's a green T icon / thumbnail, once you get there go right to the "created playlists" and start at the bottom with just the first 2 videos at the top of the Graphene playlist by clicking on the "view full playlists" below each playlist, scroll down to the bottom of the created playlists to find it. After those 2 videos at the top of the Graphene playlist, go to the Photonic computing playlist and so on, work your way to the top, watch all the Graphene playlists, and maybe even the STL playlist after those, you're going to see very big pictures here. Yeah I kind of get tired of the bias around silicon and nothing else like Graphene isn't mentioned ever with Photonics. Check out the Graphene computers for home and starships playlist on the carbon nanotubes scale up breakthrough in 2020, and Graphene aerogels made in space under the Graphene with starships playlist. Though please watch all videos from top to bottom in that order under each playlist, no cherry - picking, please force yourself to watch them in order, there is a very good reason I placed them that way. Again start at the bottom of the "created playlists", so click on the words created playlists and scroll to the bottom, the Graphene playlist should be on the bottom.

[@sahandn9]

"No Silicon can emit light..." That is not what my design did when I accidentally applied 20V to it instead of 3.3V.

[@priitmolder6475]

Now thats overclocking

[@calicoesblue4703]

🤣🤣🤣

[@franklee663]

LED is silicon, you need to revisit basics. Your solar panel is just LED in reverse mechanics. Oh sorry maybe germanium.

[@Flumphinator]

It did for a few fractions of a second, I bet.

[@thatsawesome2060]

It's sure give you smoke particle.

[@funkyfrenzyable]

Can’t believe I randomly decided to check Asianometry only to find out he had uploaded 8 seconds before. So much win!

[@markrix]

That's what happens when you check every 8 seconds.. 😆

[@ianuragaggarwal]

@@markrix 😀

[@jaidka]

Now KZbin algorithm controls your mind.

[@fox0ps22]

You missed covering the only reason why you'd want to actually do photonics at the die level: photon based computation. You can already do basic logic operations using phase interference, but the really wild stuff starts happening when you start instantly resolving massively complex Fourier transforms by shining a coherent light through a filter. I knew a guy who worked at Lucent waaay back in the day, and I remember him talking about a project involving a fiber optic network switch that could route traffic without having to first move the data off the fiber and onto copper. A completely uninterrupted light beam. I wondered how that would even be possible over the years, then I read up on photonics - which is how you'd do it. Lookup the youtuber [Huygens Optics], specifically his video [Making Optical Logic Gates using Interference]

[@maybehuman2148]

Yeah I was left somewhat confused after watching this video. A lot of information about how it works, but not why it's better or why we'd want to use this technology.

[@boots7859]

@@maybehuman2148 He said it at the outset, faster, lower heat.

[@megalonoobiacinc4863]

there's a lot to be said about photon computing. Another really important reason is that in order to make quantum computing work, you need photon logic.

[@johnwong4424]

​@@megalonoobiacinc4863 excellent point on quantum computing

[@besssam]

@fox 0ps, as was mentioned in the video light cannot pass through die features smaller than the wavelength of the light used itself. Which means that the chip will be very large and potentially very hot.

[@rb8049]

I developed optical ICs and simulators 27 years ago. Glad to see that the market has finally moved ahead to use the technology. Now the need has increased sufficiently to justify production development. Applications include LIDAR and high speed optical communications. The need will not be as high as other technologies but the volume will be enough to employ quite enough engineers.

[@nutzeeer]

I wonder which technologies will be developed once we hit the end of the road.

[@mangeshgaikwad345]

Great 👍 photonics took pace by the invention of laser

[@rb8049]

@@mangeshgaikwad345 I was integrating lasers and waveguides detectors and modulators on the same IC 27 years ago. Challenge was doing this as a one person team. All the processing, simulation, testing. Really quite impossible in the basement of a university.

[@yelectric1893]

It will be quite specialized in the field as the knowledge to pull this off has a lot of factors.

[@user-il6ke6dl3q]

no it is useless bubbles

[@geneballay9590]

Wow, I learned a lot. Thank you for all the work, and for sharing. I did a PhD in theoretical solid state physics (superconductivity) in 1976 and yet even with that background I find your videos so cutting-edge educational and well presented, that when a new one pops up, everything else stops so that I can watch it.

[@shadowshadow2724]

Do you recommend any books for photonics?

[@Veramocor]

Speed in optical fiber is the speed of light in glass or about 0.7 c. Now hollow core fiber which is new is close to 0.99

[@hikingpete]

I came to comment about the refractive index slowing light in glass, and just had my mind blown. Hollow core fiber!? And it's been around since the '90s? Wow.

[@Veramocor]

@@hikingpete it may have been around for awhile but hollow core fibers with low loss that comes close to traditional fiber is new.

That's why starlink can have lower ping in long transits than fiber on ground :p

[@jamesjensen5000]

Hollow core fiber research and developments are being accomplished in Australia with funding from the military specifically to test jet fuel integrity... fascinating developments

[@robertw1871]

Yes, plus multimodal fiber has the beams bouncing off the cladding adding a lot of distance to the path…

[@RoyvanLierop]

Dedicated AI hardware has shifted from CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> Custom ASIC -> Analog based Custom ASIC. I think Photonics will be the next efficiency milestone. Analog AI hardware might be an idea for a video?

[@guestofearth]

Yes. Exactly my thoughts.

[@guestofearth]

Hybrid analog/digital neuromorphic hardware using photonic components

[@ttb1513]

Analog based computation is more efficient than digital, but its lack of accuracy makes the jump from digital to analog a huge one.

[@boots7859]

Again, stunning presentation and deep insight into difficulties from a technical aspect as well as commercialization. With a lot of the tech websites seeming to be circling the drain, its great to see in-depth analysis is not dead. I fully expect you to reach 1M subs and more in the coming year or two if you can keep this up. I'd rather see 1 every 2 weeks if it would help to prevent burnout. Would be interesting sometime to see an episode on what you think is a potential new technology that is possible in the near term.

[@autohmae]

Current prediction by social blade based on historic growth of the channel: 2024-04-18

[@patrikgubeljak9416]

For those of you who are wondering what GSG and GSGSG stand for, it's Ground-Signal-Ground-(Signal-Ground). It refers to the layout of the electrical probes used to connect the high frequency instrumentation to the device.

[@leminhhoang1937]

As an Analog CMOS Designer, I am pretty sure that things you have mentioned in this video are being realized today, and it will be the key technology in some next decades.

[@andersjjensen]

Ah Jon! Another episode that's not just a home run, but knocks it clean out of the park! The realization that an optical gate can't be smaller than the wavelength of the light it operates on puts everything into perspective. I'm hoping for an episode on the research on room temperature super conductors and their implications for chip making!

[@SpaghettiToaster]

What prevents us from using high energy ultraviolet lasers to make smalmer optical gates?

[@Asianometry]

A gate isn't that useful if the horse is too big to walk through it.

[@SpaghettiToaster]

@@Asianometry Hence my question why we can't use higher-energy lasers, whose wavelengths will fit through smaller gates. The high-energy end of ultraviolet light is in the nanometer range.

[@kazedcat]

You need a wavelength that silicon is transparent. This limits your light to infrared

[@SpaghettiToaster]

@@kazedcat I didn't know that, thanks!

[@autohmae]

Man, I've been wondering for years, maybe almost a decade, what ever happened to this space and you've really outdone yourself with this video. Thank you very much !

[@richiericher9084]

I am amazed by how you manage to break down such a complex topic into an easily understandable 15 min video

[@CB-08]

Sometimes I sit here and think to myself ..man he's feeding us all this information Imagine who feeds him information...like it's very impressive that he's able to get or find this information not to mention the detailed pics...has he done a Q and A? If not he should soon

[@Baulder13]

Yeah I want to know his background. He's either deeply involved and knowledgeable in the economic, tech and semiconductor space or very very good at researching and writing scripts that are dense while being easy to follow paired with excellent visualizations. No other channel I know has been pumping out this much in depth content of complex topics. He's definitely has a rare talent.

[@andersjjensen]

@@Baulder13 I agree! Jon is in a league of his on in this field.

[@boots7859]

@@Baulder13 Agree, this guys breadth of knowledge and research ability, plus the fact he can present it to many of us non-PhD's is unique.

[@jannegrey593]

@@Baulder13 From what he said previously he doesn't know much about the stuff - he "just" researches topic very in depth. Those scientific papers that he shows - you can be certain the he reads all of them and more. I wish I could research like him. That takes a lot of practice and helluva brain to understand it all. Regardless - this is one of the best channels when it comes to both Semiconductor/Technology/Industry part of the world AND political/economy part of the world. He focuses mostly on pacific area (duh - Asianometry) and what is important there. But silicon industry is one of the most important parts of Asia's strength.

[@Asianometry]

Alex was so helpful for me on this topic. I really give him all the props.

[@dj_laundry_list]

1:40 Don't forget about the index of refraction!

[@salty4]

Slowly becoming my favourite channel on youtube. Been here since the beginning 👌

[@poetac15]

It’s always cool watching these types of channels rise from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of viewers.

[@WouterNederstigt]

For those interested in the inner workings of photonics, the youtube channel of The Royal Institution has a recent lecture about this (search for optical computers), which explains how it works excellently. The takeaway for me was that photonics can make clever use of the physics of light to do calculations that would be quite involved in traditional silicon, making it excellent for specific applications such as fourier transforms, edge detection of images, radar signal processing and neural networks, among others.

[@HansLemurson]

Interesting! I always thought the whole "information travelling at the speed of light" explanation for why photonics are good was a bunch of BS (since voltage waves do too).

[@johnweiner]

@8:17, a Mach-Zehnder interferometer does not split light into two wavelengths, but light of the same wavelength into two separate light beams, the path of one of which is usually systematically varied to get some sort of phase information when the two light beams are recombined. By the way, the "Mach" in the name is NOT Ernst Mach, whose name is associated with the speed of sound (the Mach number), but his son, Ludwig Mach.

[@jehuda100]

Great presentation. Good explanation and pictures with lots of interesting details. You seem to cover everything from detailed high level technology to economics. I found this very interesting and educational. Keep going with your great presentations. Good luck too.

[@yelectric1893]

The stuff inside optical chips is kind of insane. So much simulation and math is used to refractivly bend light with tactically placed blocks of different refractivity in the nano scale. Just insanity

[@yelectric1893]

This could be the key for phased array optical systems too. Light field based displays or something, if each emitter is synchronized. I have no idea though

[@howwitty]

@@yelectric1893 Very cool idea to incorporate photonics in coherent optical MIMO. In fact, it's recently been demonstrated that speeds of over 1 petabyte per second are possible in a fiber optic cable. That's a lot of data. They use Raman spectroscopy, which is another great topic for this channel since a lot of the papers coming out of Asian countries need to use raman spectroscopy or other techniques to optimize their new ideas for information technology. As you pointed out, this could be used for displays as well.

[@yelectric1893]

@@howwitty Hi, I’ve never heard of the Raman concept but is it like an EDA software? Seems very interesting.

[@howwitty]

@@yelectric1893 It's like a quantum ruler for molecules I guess!

[@Abyss-Will]

almost as insane as the insides of electrical chips, pure black magic going on inside all those fancy procesors, even mine, I can't belive intel managed to run windows in a fucking potato

[@ichbinueber18]

"Nothing is faster than the speed of light" In vacuum AFAIK is electrical current faster than light in fiberoptic cables. They use fiber optics because of other properties such as interface resistance and low degration of the signals and low power needed.

[@gizachewdiga7648]

Silicon Photonics is a broad area of discussion in semiconductor industry. This is the best lecture. Thanks!

[@shadowshadow2724]

This is not Asianometry this is Siliconometry. Great video!

[@raphaelcardoso7927]

I'm doing my PhD in computing with silicon photonics. There are quite a lot of problems, mostly related to the interactions being based on interference and thus super sensible to temperature and variations. For example, the MZIs or ring resonators that he mentioned need continuous thermal tuning to work in their best behavior. That's the fun part. With problems, there's a lot of fun to have to try and solve them. Thank you for the video !

[@xxportalxx.]

That makes integrating them into ics a bit worse of an idea eh?

[@JL-pc2eh]

@@xxportalxx. no, you just have to solve the problems first

[@xxportalxx.]

@@JL-pc2eh it certainly gives even more credence to the separate chiplet strategy, however I wonder if you'd need like a separate heatspreader to decouple it from the ic running computations. If the physics itself is sensitive to temperature variation then thermally coupling it to an ic that's temperature is highly variable with load is a bad idea.

[@raphaelcardoso7927]

@@xxportalxx. what people do right now is add little resistances with feedback loops to heat the sensitive components and adjust their frequency response, which is not free by the way, but if you're operating around 50GHz the cost per bit goes down. In my lab there are some guys working on the thermal response of devices and trying to make more robust photonic circuits with this regard

[@xxportalxx.]

@@raphaelcardoso7927 that seems rather difficult to maintain to me without significant thermal isolation (i.e. an isolated chiplet), as you're fighting both your active cooling loop, and the random heat spikes from the cpu. If it weren't isolated I would think you'd be limited to the range at or above the max temp of the cpu-cooler system, below that and the cpu could push your temps too high, unfortunately this also means you'd be fighting your cooling system constantly (and likely be degrading cpu performance).

[@egonvanpraet]

Lets go, recommended it a couple months ago and you delivered! You're the best :)

[@valopf7866]

Another great upload! Thanks for putting so much effort in these videos.

[@MoonRegolith]

One of your best videos! You should keep revisiting this topic, as it covers all the best of your normal topics, but also gives us such a great insight into the bleeding edge of a practical future.

[@sosaysthecaptain5580]

This is becoming one of my favorite channels. Fascinating stuff!

[@justcommenting4981]

One of the best channels on KZbin. Subscriber count is finally beginning to reflect that.

[@harrykekgmail]

I have been waiting for this video on photonics for some time. Thank you.

[@babyboijeremy]

If i had to read this info i'd never finish it. But somehow i stay interested when the info is presented in this way.

[@valeriopreite7573]

Good video, as usual for your channel. Some small notes: optical fibre communications started in the 70s. In the early 90s WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) was commercialized, mostly thanks to optical fibre amplifiers like those based on Erbium doped fibres. And the propagation speed (m/s) is not the matter: electrical signals travel more or less at comparable speeds, which, by the way, in an optical fibre are more around 200000 km/s than the 300000 km/s value in vacuum, because they are made of glass. The point is that with light in dielectric materials you can achieve much larger frequencies, whereas metals become very lossy and suffer from signal integrity problems already at some Gb/s. Another important detail is that optical communications become convenient beyond a certain product of data rate and distance: for short distances like intra chip or intra board ones, electrical connections are still convenient.

[@thom1218]

Nothing is faster than the speed of light *in a vacuum* It can be significantly slower traveling through matter, including fiber-optic transmission lines.

[@stargazerch.3605]

13:30 this looks like a city with street crossing and all. So cool!

[@anb1142]

I searched info about these for a hour or so and I found my findings to be inadequate Thanks for the well researched video

[@sooocheesy]

9:54 that's some cutting edge soldering on those SMD caps.

[@blinded6502]

I mean, sure, electrons can be used to make chips a lot more compact. But photonics can be used to make them a lot more efficient. Silicon wafers are dirt cheap, and manufacturing methods don't have to be super-precise. And since they don't generate as much heat, you could stack them together, making it all more-or-less compact.

[@makerbotplanet]

Super clear and seemed to target the questions that I'd had and not asked. Great video, 10/10, thank you

[@El.Duder-ino]

Another excellent episode worth watching and learning about these amazing technologies.

[@ColonelCavalier]

Silicon nitride and even more recently LiNbO-on-Insulator have started to really challenge SOI photonics. Much lower loss, broader transmission, commercial fabs with PDKs, and LiNbO has pretty much the best EO (i.e. pockels effect). SOI still has the better density, big fabs behind it, and it technically can be directly interegrated with Si electronics (SiN peeps argue so can SiN, eh)... but as you say mutli-die seems to be the way foward. Also there was silica photonics (not fiber mainly AWGs) but that has basically died a death.

[@What-he5pr]

I think the coolest technology should win.

[@boo9523]

Quantum Photonics, this will be the breakthrough for SIlicon Photonics.

[@christopherleubner6633]

My field of study was optoelctronic engineering/photonics. Being able to directly use silicon for it all would be a game changer to be sure. Currently, they are using Gallium Nitride to make photonic IC chips. You can create the analogius parts except a capacitor. Lithium niobate or precisely doped GaNb can be used as a transistor analog and simply changing the dopant levels of the GaN substrate can create waveguides for the photons. One possibility is creating a quantum computing analog that could operate near room temperature since the optical analogs of Q bit elements would have indefinite coherence since the thermally populated domain is far below the the energy states of the photons used. The future is quite bright. ❤

[@ZQQHello1919rty]

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Love it!

[@x2ul725]

Alot of DAX and UAX (downstream and upstream connections) are using fiber cables even for short distances between control points. I think this was done as the safety critical devices often take up to 7 seconds to complete math before mechanical relays fire off motors and such.

[@taktoa1]

Plasmonics is pretty exciting, has the potential to bring this stuff down to the nanoscale

[@stevengill1736]

That's what I wondered, if the silicon components are getting smaller than the wavelength of visible light, how to integrate them? Wow!

[@vevenaneathna]

i bet they could eventually use shorter wave lengths too. surface plasmas are messy though

[@raphaelcardoso7927]

@@vevenaneathna the hard part with shorter wavelengths is finding good materials to make waveguides for them. Silicon right now is on 1550nm mostly

[@vevenaneathna]

@@raphaelcardoso7927 ya thats over my head. idk, some kind of lead or gold alloy? i know there are quatnum mechanical effects that get a lot worse when u have "surface plasma" state, and I feel like heizenburg uncertanty might come into play if the channel was able to be super narrow or super flat/polarized, and im thinking that would limit the bandwidth/frequency range you could use if it wasnt just a binary 1,0 data

[@TheZorch]

1:33 Not exactly, light slows down when it travels through a medium. Even if that medium is fiber optic cable. Light only travels at the speed of light in a vacuum.

[@christianb1176]

100%. The other common myth is that "light is faster than electronics", which is not true if this is taken to mean light (in the visible/near IR) will travel faster than an electromagnetic wave through a copper wire. The wave in the copper wire is significantly faster and causes problems for the design of electro-optic devices, like modulators. The reason we say "optics is way faster than electronics" is because of the available bandwidth at ~193 THz (optics) vs at ~3 GHz (RF). We can use 100s GHz of available bandwidth at the high frequencies of optics to stuff lots of data, much more so than can be stuffed in the narrow bands near 3 GHz.

[@TheZorch]

@@christianb1176 The speed of electricity through a wire or circuit in comparison to light through a fiber optic cable is a matter of much scientific debate. But, you are correct about the bandwidth. Light can carry significantly more data. Technically, electrons should move at a similar speed to photons, but there's a little thing called electrical resistance. That's why billions are being poured into research to find super conductors that can operate at room temperature.

[@Weisior]

I just wonder... This whole LIDAR thingy could be a revolutionary solution for military purposes, seeker head accuracy precision revolution to be exact. I imagine a lidar seeker connected with the processing-database unit integrated into missile seeker head, mapping the environment in real time, processing it and comparing with available database of potential targets. Then with surgical precision it directs the missile right into lets say tank weak spot, coaxial machinegun port where the armor is minimal or nonexistent for example. You can use much smaller projectile, thus easier to accelerate with limited mass and cost compared to today. Absolute precision could completely eliminate the need to expend few cruise missiles just to use one to strike the enemy mobile command post, ammo magazine on enemy carrier,...

[@420yoloscopes]

Now you’re thinking like an engineer! Lockheed will be in touch.

[@RehanRC]

You're describing Silicon Photonics having the classic business problem of emerging technologies. It will be the future; it just needs to find a market first. Then it will improve more after gaining a market until eventually a new technology with the same classic business problem will emerge to replace Silicon Photonics.

[@christianb1176]

It's in the market right now. Products already exist from companies like Intel and Luxtera.

[@outsideworld76]

The transmission speed in electric cables doesn't depend on the slowing down of electrons due to their interaction with atoms. It depends on the slowing down of the propagation speed for electromagnetic waves and fields in the medium used. Air core coaxiaal cable has propagation speed close to 'c'.

[@kazedcat]

The problem is not propagation the problem is keeping the signal to noise ratio so that it is still possible to recover the signal in the other end.

[@raphaelcardoso7927]

For sure! However, charging the parasitic capacitor on the line at a few GHz gets expensive really quickly

[@outsideworld76]

@@raphaelcardoso7927 a reel of coax makes an excellent dummy load above a couple of 100 Mc. Shut down the transmitter when smoke starts to develop.

[@christechtime4297]

Interesting, after learning about Moore's law; and after I saw the AMD edge video, sounds like Moore's law has kind of been a stumbling block for some, glad there are other industries capable of seeing the brilliance of the advancement we have created and are taking new approaches to it rather than working to double the speeds and such, heck even if we stay idle and work on Photoonics, who knows there might be a downtrend and then a jump way past the predictions. Great video yet again, thanks.

[@trik6762]

I rly love all the videos on this channel and was thinking if you were thinking on making a video on 2D materials and their possible use as well as industry (if there is any right now)

[@edwardbishop979]

The only channel I like before watching, you just know the content will be great

[@seanprice7645]

was literally looking this technology up a few days ago, popped into my head randomly while thinking about fiber optic data transfer.

[@muhsinali9191]

Great video. I would like to add one more thing. At 7:40 regarding Si-InP hybrid lasers, TUe in Netherlands has done a further fabrication advancement. With their IMOS fab, the InP components are directly grown on top of Si wafer leading to heterogenous integration. One more future application of Si photonics is programmable chips. A startup in Spain, iPRONICS, is developing photonic FPGA or PFPGA. There's a lot to come in future but no doubt data centres and LiDAR are the winner applications.

[@averythecatto]

I've been interested in stuff like integrating light manipulation into electronics for quite a while, even optical fiber data transmission is really interesting to me. Now we have the potential for light-based computing architectures, or at least the beginnings of a framework for it. That is beyond amazing to me.

[@christianb1176]

Major problem with the "optical computer" is a lack of optical memory. Optics is good as the interface between electronics-based computers.

[@averythecatto]

@@christianb1176 You do have a good point. To simplify things early on, however, we could create a kind of "translator" that allows conventional memory to be used. This will cause bandwidth issues, but it would help to prove the concept until a better solution is found. For the record, though, I'm absolutely not an expert, so that's mainly baseless guessing on my part.

[@jamesjensen5000]

Photonics most promising applications are in quantum computing and as and energy producing system... treating the capture of light from the sun as a wave (RF instead of particle light capture ) using nano antenna grown and combined with quantum dot electron energizing, as a “rectenna” ( energy harvesting from electromagnetic signal) producing a single photon to be generated can be scaled up from very small imputes ...combined millions of times to create a steady flow of individual single photons... nearly 100% efficient as compared to 20% average efficiency of current solar collectors... the issue is storage of photonic energy... electron storage in batteries is currently our only choice... we need photonic storage devices separate from electric storage devices to reach future growth on photonics use and quantum energy production.

[@taith2]

Watching it again, and best future I could think of are SMD elements offering superior speed and data transfers than motherboards with 8 layers of PCB and gigantic connectors, with this flood gates of optical connection would be open, and the most advanced solutions would have TSV connection with CPUs, allowing to combine processing units at unprecedented scale, connectors and pricing needs to drop for it tho

[@NeistH2o]

3:28 Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch, update it Name it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, send it, fax, rename it Touch it, touch it, touch it, touch it Technologic

[@Greggozzo]

Really well done. Easy to understand for a 5- year old to understand. Good intro to explore the subject further. Thanks a lot.

[@zAlaska]

The cube computer. Clear as a window. Singularity in a 6-inch cube you can move like a disk. The stand, the transceiver.

[@mashurshalehin4972]

hey man, big fan of your videos. From the viewers point I have a suggestion for you. Please add some background music to the videos. I think it will help a lot to keep the focus.

[@SciHeartJourney]

Think your SSD (solid state drive) is better than the old disk drives? Think again! Flash memory DEGRADES every time you erase it. There's a breakdown that occurs during the cell erase. Do it enough times and that memory cell won't work anymore. Recently I was studying photonics at the time and saw a possible solution. I'm still new to all this. This video shows a bright future for an emerging technology!

[@peterdoyle8571]

Sounds like photonic motherboards connecting disparate optical to electrical data chiplets will be one way to reduce power consumption, improve latency, and bandwidth issues before we see optical on chip routing

[@changchadchanamdong2668]

Do one about carbon processors. Graphene. I heard china is investing in that.

[@Darryl_Frost]

"The juice is not worth the squeeze" Love it... I think I'm going use that one..

[@PplsChampion]

14:26 outstanding meme usage

[@movax20h]

Speed of light in fiber is actually slow. Like 1/2 of speed of light in vacuum. Things can move faster than speed of light. You cannot travel faster than a speed of light in a vacuum. There are also hollow fibers, buy but this is rather recent development and not used at large scale. Optical fibers are used because of low attenuation, no interference and easy wide band application methods available. Making them ideal for long distance.

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

Hello, Mr. Jon. What do you think of photonic logic chips like those offered by the startup: LightMatters?

[@shuyanzhang828]

Hi, I like your videos because you presented the facts well and also presented your analysis and views.

[@douro20]

Jean-Marc Verdiell, the guy behind the CuriousMarc channel, worked a lot with silicon photonics both at his own company, LightLogic, and at Intel which purchased the company in 2001.

[@rayoflight62]

Using optical transistors, which utilises photons instead of electrons is an old dream of all semiconductor technologists. It would allow an integrated circuit (IC) completely made out of crystal, where the refraction index change under the effect of photons; at the same as the level of conduction in a crystal changes with the level of electric fields and the number of electron/hole recombinations. My opinion is, this is going to stay a dream for quite a while...

[@rayoflight62]

I want to add, the problem of creating a photonic transistor of the same size of a current transistor with 7 nanometer gate, can only be solved with a deeper theoretical knowledge of what is common to a photon and electron, the quantum spin number. Quantum spin is not a real spin, rather it is a description of the invisible connections the particle has with Space and all surrounding the particle as it moves. This knowledge is still very lacking and it is at base of all the modern theories - trying to explain the very nature of things...

[@rayoflight62]

I forgot to say, thank you very much for this video and all your deep and informed journalism on current and future technologies...

[@boots7859]

@@rayoflight62 Go read up on some of the companies he listed. OP transisters may not be the standard across billions on a chip, however highly likely that key areas will be where they can do the most good initially, soon.

[@rayoflight62]

I didn't mean to diminish the achievements of the big names involved. I was trying to point out that the current OP technology is not the equivalent of doped silicon and electric fields technology, but OP is a component based on light path geometries and interference effects, because we don't have (yet) the theoretical foundations for a 1:1 equivalent...

[@Zen_Power]

Great video. Did you complete a PhD in this field at all? If you did I’d be really interested to know which research group you worked in so I could read the publications.

[@houseofnhti]

Even when Moore's law began to break down due to the fact that the reduction in the size of silicon transistors came to physical limits, it turned out that it was more profitable to continue to bring CMOS to mind than to look for something fundamentally new. Novoselov and Geim were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene almost ten years ago; and where is that graphene? That's right, in the same place as carbon nanotubes and all other materials of the future.

[@xxportalxx.]

Well they're still trying to find cost effective methods of industry scale production for those materials. Most of the benefits of graphene especially in electronics specifically requires uninterrupted sheets as well, which further complicates the production process.

[@bernl178]

What do you need to do with electrical impulse laser? Zeros and ones in the form of pulse and pulse intensity, perhaps

[@herecomeschina3481]

Amazing work. Thanks!

[@fllthdcrb]

So, if we wanted photonic microprocessors with the same feature size as current electronic ones, we'd need to use light with a wavelength of a few nanometers. That's... around the boundary between extreme ultraviolet and X-rays. Yikes!

[@maurywood492]

As an industry insider - almost 40 now - this was pretty good. Several of your pronunciations are off - CMOS (moss not mos), MACOM (may not ma), Mach Zehnder, etc. On-die optical interconnect makes no sense for power and reach (distances are very short) reasons. Check the activity going on with NPO and CPO and chiplets to see the future.

[@Calandron1]

Source for 2:20 possibly? Silicon has no doubt been studied extensively, but intuition makes me think carbon would beat it out. Thanks for another top teir video. You do a great service for your viewers. Your videos are remarkably insightful and interesting. Well researched, etc. Thanks again

[@kazedcat]

If you include organic compound then carbon will win but if you limit the scope to inorganic crystals then silicon wins.

[@MrSupervin94]

You have not mentioned photonic quantum computing and quantum optics, but that would have taken the double of the time. Maybe it's an idea for a new video. Great job by the way!

[@lcheng6]

Thank you for the valuable research!

[@johnweiner]

@14:11...subwavelength optical/material interaction is well-known and well-studied in physics and EE labs for about twenty years...see a long series of articles by Nader Engheta in Physical Review and other journals, relating subwavelength optics to conventional electronic circuit analysis.

[@andrewharbit7449]

The potential I see in photonic marriage to motherboard design is a hper connection between the ram, rom, cpu, gpu. I think that motherboards should contain the power lanes in copper and data lanes in fiber. After all how many channels can fit into a single strand of fiber

[@miklov]

Fascinating. Thank you!

[@MichelMohr]

Could I suggest a small intro sound that plays at the very start of the video? I'm always unsure if my headset is off, or the audio is muted or the volume is turned down. Just something small.

[@sarcasmo57]

I hope I live to see all this cool stuff and others thinks like it come to our lives.

[@Saturn2888]

Replacing copper wires with light is actually an idea I had. I was thinking how you could make chips faster, and the only thing faster is light :P. Obviously, my "idea" doesn't mean anything, but I"m so glad I saw this video. It means your other videos explained lithography good enough that I could come up with this idea on my own. It seems like the next logical step.

[@clivebradley2633]

"Bookham" Danno - We had 'fun' now we're just a footnote in history

[@martinsimlastik5457]

Great video again!!!

[@nedisawegoyogya]

Holography would be the best application I found around the horizon

[@Kilohercas]

light is always traveling at the speed of light. problem is that light in fiber is nearly 50% slower than in air

[@markcatoe1206]

Jon, have a look. Lightwave Logic - makes CPU/ASICs faster, it's all in the EO polymer 1) Semiconductor modulators are a SUNSET business 2) LWLG Polymer modulators are a SUNRISE business 3) LWLG modulators are already more than 3x the speed 4) LWLG modulators are Order of Magnitude Lower Power 5) Many Customers & Partners all under NDA currently 6) Many Foundries implementing LWLG technology in PDK's 7) at OFC 2022 "gloves were off" and the Customer Base was opening discussing the imminent need for LWLG technology where in previous years such discussions were only behind closed doors under NDA 8) At OFC 2022 -- Lebby said "so now it is not a case of Lightwave Logic pushing its Polmer technology, it's a case of Lightwave Logic be dragged along by the Customer base saying >> hey this is really cool, we need to utilize this technology!!" 9) LWLG Polymers are in fact just as Reliable/Robust as Semiconductors

[@maximeumbra7235]

It is not electrons moving in the copper wire that carriers the current, it's the electromagnetic field. The electron motion itself is what gives rise to resistance heating and losses. That is how super conductors work, by elimination of the material itself changing under load the field can move unimpeded. The electrons in electricity serve as the field carriers not as the carrier of the charge.

[@calicoesblue4703]

That is actually correct. Electronic books never make that distinction for whatever reason. Well done😎👏👏👏👏

[@maximeumbra7235]

I've never quite understood why that is, sure it's a little more complicated but not by all that much compared to say complex board design et cetera and it gives rise to many dangerous myths on the nature of electrical dangers, most people think water is an excellent conductor (only moderately so) but are completely oblivious to the dangers of airborne dust and smoke being as good or even better conductors resulting in quite a number of electrocutions every year.

[@sirfer6969]

Light travels through optical fibres at the speed of light through optical fibres which is markedly slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is what people usually mean when they say "speed of light" without qualification

[@ninupimps007]

What is the current status between different foundries. Who is what stage etc

[@robertw1871]

Fiber has a refractive index so light is slowed in the medium… So nothing moves faster than light in a vacuum, which moves far faster than light in a fiber….

[@W2wxftcxxtcrw]

My prof was talking about phase change materials (pcm) can you talk about that?

[@sshko101]

Imagine a future where everyone is keen on getting a laser installed in their house and everything plugs into laser sockets on your walls... A world where you just order new optical logic circuits from the factory to get stacked onto each other to get "soldered" with fiber optics between layers to solve your specific task with just a laser you have. I remember those sleeples nights of imagining logical inversion on diodes or some mysterious new logic gates that might exist in photonics, ah those good old bicycle invention days.

[@shadowshadow2724]

Laser socket? you don't need electricity for those chips?

[@sshko101]

​@@shadowshadow2724 Not for my hypothetical ones. As were mentioned in this video modern approaches (as in photonics logics chips or tranceivers) mainly use either another semiconducter material for the laser inside the chip or a laser beam guided from another source, but we still rely on electro-magnetical excitation of some crystal in order to make a laser beam. Not really sure about actual signal fade in my theoretically endless scalability and real world quality of full internal reflection inside modern silicon photonics and how often would you need a repeater (more added energy) in such scenario. The obvious elephant in the room is the price (or energy and materials) wasted on manufacturng such devices relative to the lifetime energy consumption plus manufacturing expenditures of alternative electro-magnetic ones. On the other hand it's really hard to define the efficiency of modern electric chips since it's always relative to the electricity and price of equipment to the number of operations calculated during certain period of time. That period of time is usually defined not by the lifetime of a chip but rather by monetary benefit of upgrading your system into some newer generation technology. At the same time there should be always done this software/hardware weigh in in order to know whether your logic circuits are even worth making to be "set in stone" forever. The real benefit of such photonic approach would be almost indefinite lifespan of such a system (with only the risc of physical destruction and maybe some lychens). It should not fear solar wind or any rapid shift of magnetic field of our planet or even electro-magnetic waves from nuclear blasts or any nuclear blasts in ionosphere for that matter. Unlike crypto where you just burn coal for nothing you can "burn" some logic circuit forever whenever you have some free wind or sunshine... Em but for the lasers you would still need to transfer energy for them in some manner, preferably electric, if only there were some method to make a laser from concentrated sunlight. OK, I'm not an expert neither in lasers nor in photonics but at one point I had a plan (among many others) to get my masters degree in Germany in order to get somehow to the GlobalFoundries since they have a lot of IPs in photonics, but that never happened unfortunately.

[@user-zu1ix3yq2w]

Light does not move through fiber at the speed of light. Saying it does is bad phrasing. It's about the medium it's propagating in. Look up velocity factor on wikipedia and you'll see it is 2/3rds the speed of light. You need a hollow-core fiber cable if you want to attain near 1c speeds. (The speed of light in a vacuum is 1c). Radio waves don't have this same latency issue.

[@kinngrimm]

Isn't this a must have tech for aerospace? As it has less/no(?) interference with magnetism or cosmic radition, or am i mistaken?