One of the posters here brought this article to my attention:
Physicists build universal optics chip
He asked whether this could be competition to POET. Well, no. This is pure R&D (research and development) – without the D, at least at this stage. Nothing that will appear as a marketable product anytime soon.
From a technological standpoint this is pretty fascinating stuff, because the researchers in Bristol, UK, are not only moving the light around inside the chip, they are also having it compute some linear optics stuff. They built something they call Universal Linear Optical Processor (LPU). This is some silicon photonics quantum circuitry inside a chip.
- That chip has some input channels where they feed in photons from external light sources. (For silicon photonics you always need to have more or less "external" light sources, and if it is a piece of GaAs bonded to the silicon chip. Nice, isn't it?)
- Inside the chip the photons interact in one or the other quantum way, carrying out computations. What exactly they are supposed to compute, is re-programmable. The processor can be set up for a new experiment "in milliseconds".
- The result appears as photons on the chip's output channels. These photons go to some external (once again "external") photodetectors in order to be detected and counted.
Does this have anything to do with POET? Well, perhaps, but certainly not directly. POET, as we know it (why do I hesitate to write down the word "know"?), today only moves light inside the chip and brings it very quickly to the place where it is needed. However, it does not compute. For computations, light has to be converted to electrical current first, and transistors then do the computations.
However, we also know that POET has developed some quantum computing stuff. We don't know any details, but I wouldn't be surprised if these technologies would follow similar principles as those of the Universal Linear Optical Processor.
Could be the foundation for very fast computing with the speed of, um, light!
