Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light...

[cantwealljustgetalong]

HERZLIYA, Israel (Reuters) - An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.

Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications.

"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."

...

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20031029_40.html

[drdon326]

1. Yeah.....a 50 year failure....

leader in biotech and technology.

NEVER AGAIN.

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. autonomous military systems?

Oh sure - that's safe.

[bemildred]

3. This is bullshit.

PR bullshit.
Current systems already run near the speed of light.
That isn't the problem.
Not that this sort of thing might not offer some advantages.

[drdon326]

4. uhhhh....

you're not going to call them "MORONS" again, are you??

[bemildred]

5. Who is "them"?

I don't believe anybody in this article has come up before.

[newyorican]

6. Electricity and electrons...

already move at or near light speed, so that part is BS. The significance of this is an EMP resistant processor as a compliment to bubble memory which is also EMP resistant.

[bemildred]

7. Highly parallel DSP.

Probably doing FFTs(?).
It is kind of interesting, if a bit specialized.
I still don't see how it's a fast way to move data
unless they are exploiting the bandwith you can get
with light circuits, so I suppose there is some sort of
wide bus arrangement. It would be interesting to see
the parallel architecture, but I don't expect that will
be published anytime soon.

Edit:

The DSP part would seem to be conventional, so I
dunno if this thing would be EMP resistant without shielding.

One can certainly see the utility of it in control applications
for unmanned vehicles if it's as small as they say.

[newyorican]

9. Upon further investigation...

Running at a modest 225-MHz, the EnLight performs 8 tera-MAC (multiply-accumulate) operations per second at 125 million transformations per second. However, the hardware has one ironic twist: the optical DSP itself requires an electron-driven DSP to assist it in control applications, Goren said.

Lenslet will market the EnLight 256 and successive generation either as a standalone DSP or as a co-processor to a standard CPU. The company plans to help developers by providing high-level functions such as filter banks and matched filters, as well as DFT, IDFT, IDCT functions in C and Matlab libraries. Goren also said the company plans to ship additional tools to allow customers to develop their own transform libraries, such as assemblers, linkers, and a debugger.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,90903,00.asp

Now why the hell would I want design in a DSP that needs a DSP to drive it? Because the Enlight "processor" doesn't Digitally process anything. It reminds me of the old Univac computer using magnetic cores. "Space" was considered infinite, so the Army just kept adding rooms of magnetic cores until the desired effect was achieved. This is pretty much the same only with photons and a near infinite bandwidth.

That being said, it is an innovation for sure. It lays down a direct challenge to Moores Law. The challenge to Lenslet will be to get this to the market before they are overtaken by some of the big guys.

[bemildred]

10. Nice link, thanks.

The return of the analog processor. Heh.

[Adalah]

8. Why am I suddenly

...feeling a bit dim...