Light-Based Memory Chip Is First To Permanently Store Data

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According to this article, researchers have created the first permanent optical memory on a chip that can permanently store data.

Today’s electronic computer chips work at blazing speeds. But an alternate version that stores, manipulates, and moves data with photons of light instead of electrons would make today’s chips look like proverbial horses and buggies. Now, one team of researchers reports that it has created the first permanent optical memory on a chip, a critical step in that direction.
 
Quantum computing can't come fast enough. If they can find a way to commercialize this technology with current technology, it will be a massive win.
 
Bhaskaran, Pernice, and their colleagues also took steps to dramatically increase the amount of data they could store and read. For starters, they sent multiple wavelengths of light through the waveguide at the same time, allowing them to write and read multiple bits of data simultaneously, something you can’t do with electrical data storage devices. And, as they report this week in Nature Photonics, by varying the intensity of their data-writing pulses, they were also able to control how much of each GST patch turned crystalline or amorphous at any one time. With this method, they could make one patch 90% amorphous but just 10% crystalline, and another 80% amorphous and 20% crystalline. That made it possible to store data in eight different such combinations, not just the usual binary 1s and 0s that would be used for 100% amorphous or crystalline spots. This dramatically boosts the amount of data each spot can store, Bhaskaran says.
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yes, please....do want! :eek:
 
This is way beyond me and most likely a lot of other members feel the same as I do.

Anyone care to simplify this a bit so I can maybe understand the gravity of this discovery?
 
rotarymotor said:
This is way beyond me and most likely a lot of other members feel the same as I do.

Anyone care to simplify this a bit so I can maybe understand the gravity of this discovery?
Click to expand...

Did you read the article it explains it pretty well:
"Interest in so-called photonic chips goes back decades, and it’s easy to see why. When electrons move through the basic parts of a computer chip—logic circuits that manipulate data, memory circuits that store it, and metal wires that ferry it along—they bump into one another, slowing down and generating heat that must be siphoned away. That’s not the case with photons, which travel together with no resistance, and do so at, well, light speed. Researchers have already made photon-friendly chips, with optical lines that replace metal wires and optical memory circuits. But the parts have some serious drawbacks. The memory circuits, for example, can store data only if they have a steady supply of power. When the power is turned off, the data disappear, too."

What did you not get, or were you joking? You'd like need like a black hole to slow down the photons.

It looks like they are saying these chips could use octal instead of binary for their counting system for higher density storage of data, nice (now if only they could make light based processors that operated in octal instead of binary that would make such things even better, though of course just moving to photons will be a huge improvement).

Next step FTL computing so you could get an answer to today's problem yesterday ;).
 
bob616 said:
Did you read the article it explains it pretty well:
"Interest in so-called photonic chips goes back decades, and it’s easy to see why. When electrons move through the basic parts of a computer chip—logic circuits that manipulate data, memory circuits that store it, and metal wires that ferry it along—they bump into one another, slowing down and generating heat that must be siphoned away. That’s not the case with photons, which travel together with no resistance, and do so at, well, light speed. Researchers have already made photon-friendly chips, with optical lines that replace metal wires and optical memory circuits. But the parts have some serious drawbacks. The memory circuits, for example, can store data only if they have a steady supply of power. When the power is turned off, the data disappear, too."

What did you not get, or were you joking? You'd like need like a black hole to slow down the photons.

It looks like they are saying these chips could use octal instead of binary for their counting system for higher density storage of data, nice (now if only they could make light based processors that operated in octal instead of binary that would make such things even better, though of course just moving to photons will be a huge improvement).

Next step FTL computing so you could get an answer to today's problem yesterday ;).
Click to expand...

I still don't quite fully understand it.

The part about when the power turns off, to me, sounds like it's similar to RAM. So is this discovery good for something long term storage (HDDs/SSDs) or something to replace our now known RAM.

I think what I am asking is, what changes could this bring this in current devices we use on a daily basis?
 
rotarymotor said:
I still don't quite fully understand it.

The part about when the power turns off, to me, sounds like it's similar to RAM. So is this discovery good for something long term storage (HDDs/SSDs) or something to replace our now known RAM.

I think what I am asking is, what changes could this bring this in current devices we use on a daily basis?
Click to expand...

The thing about RAM is that, it works on the concept of storing electrical charge. Every DRAM cell consist of a capacitor to store electrical charge (and a switch connecting to it). To store a data in the cell, you charge up the capacitor. So whether the capacitor is filled with charge, or empty, will be interpreted as 1 or 0.

The thing about capacitor is that, ideally once it's charge, you can leave it alone as it will retain those electrical charge. However in the real world, we cannot prevent leakage completely, and so it's charge will slowly drain off. Therefore, we need to refresh all memory cell from time to time, where we will recharge the capacitor to ensure it's electrical charge remains high at all time.

But the important thing is, it can retain it's charge for awhile before it needs to be refresh. So you are not constantly providing electrical charge to it. The reason why the DRAM device needs constant power is so that it could refresh the memory cells from time to time. But the cell itself doesn't need constant power.

Obviously this concept cannot be use for light wave, as we cannot simply create a capacitor that can store light wave. Light waves cannot be stored. So there's a need for other ways of storing data in a circuit that operates using light wave only.
 
Sounds interesting, but like lots of other revolutionary technologies, it needs to leave the labs and end up in affordable computers before it really matters much.
 
Wicked cool from a photonics/materials science perspective, but we've been excited about plenty of historic phase-change materials ramping from a single laboratory experiment to a paradigm-changing platform. I'm not holding my breath.

And there is PLENTY of loss along optical paths, it's just less than electrical losses.
 
I think the point is more that this is still being worked on and may someday (decades most likely) be a possible answer (i.e. commercial product) to the problems we are now experiencing with trying to shrink the current silicone based processes. We need something and this is one of several possibilities.
 
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