“The future of Chips is Photon Driven Chips.”: WireUnwired.
For a long time researchers were working on alternatives of electricity powered chips because of several bottlenecks that they are posing for future of chips and thus the future of Artificial Intelligence. Looks like Scientists have finally achieved what they were trying to make ,for the first time scientists have been able to design a chip that is powered by photons instead of electricity(Photon Driven Chip). Some bottlenecks that were posing maximum difficulty for the future of technology was unable to follow the Moore’s Law. Since its inception in 1965 chips had stick to this principle that the number of transistors will double every two years without a rise in production costs or energy consumption. But now it has become extremely difficult for the researchers to fit approximately double the amount of Transistors every year because of several reasons.
Transistors are the heart of semiconductor chips .Think of them as the water gauges. As water gauges can control the amount of water flowing though them in the similar manner Transistor control the flow of electricity inside the chips. They are like the tiny switches which control the flow of electricity through the chips. For more details you can check out this article.
Roughly speaking more transistors means more control over the current thus more control over the power that is higher computing power and thus higher the power required for the chip to operate. More power means more speed and more heat produced but there is a physical limitation to the maximum amount of heat that a tiny chip can handle . This is the biggest threat to Moore’s Law.
How Photon Driven Chips will replace Classical Chips?
Till now we saw how Moore’s Law has been the greatest bottleneck for the future of chips. But this bottleneck is not gonna remain there , it will affect the greatest invention of Human Being “The Artificial Intelligence” . To train AI we need chips that can train the AI models much faster but to achieve maximum achieve again we need chips which can operate much faster and for that we need much more transistors if we rely on Classical chips.
By using Photons to perform complex calculations instead of electrons the chips can overcome the practical limitations of the classical chip and thus will greatly accelerate the processing speed of computers while also reducing energy requirements.
Using Photons instead of electrons we will have many advantages like:
- Photons travel with the speed of light which electrons can never come close to since it will be completely unfeasible to develop such systems again at such small areas. Faster travelling speed would mean faster processing speeds.
- Photons are massless entities , thus travelling at light speed would not emit as much heat as the electron powered chips generate today.
Thus both the problems of speed and energy requirements get eliminated.
How Scientists Designed Photon Driven Chips?
Generally when we have to design conventions chips or say classical chips , we take a silicon wafer of uniform height but for designing photon driven chips scientists went for non-uniform height silicon wafers. They made it thinner at certain regions and left the remaining regions untouched. If you want to know about “How Semiconductor are Fabricated ” then you can check out this Article.
Researchers went for non-uniform wafer height because they wanted to have control over the propagation of light through the chip as non uniformity of height were allowing them to scatter the light thus allowing them to do calculations at the speed of light .
For mathematical calculations the researchers also built a light based platform that can do mathematical calculations and named it as “vector-matrix multiplications”. This method is also used to train neural networks on which these Big LLM’s like ChatGPT ,Bard are trained on.
Also Read :A Comprehensive Guide to Electronics Roles in Industry in 2024
Future Of Photon Driven Chips.
Researchers who have developed this photon driven chips are claiming that they can fit into the size that of normal classical chips while at the same time providing much faster speeds and less energy consumptions . Also they are claiming that the architecture has been built to support modern day requirements of big LLM’s and Augmented reality. It will be Interesting to see what the future holds for these photon driven chips.
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