This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Computer chips have two important parts, the logic on the chip which computes and executes programs,

and then there's the part that sends and receives,

gets it out of a crunch, sends back the answer.

And while that first part, chip logic, has gotten much faster over the years,

the transmission part has lagged behind because data gets sent via electrical signals passing through copper.

So researchers designed a chip that exchanges data with light instead.

By going into optics, we're able to relieve this fundamental bottleneck of copper.

And in doing so, we're able to increase the bandwidth density on the chip, so how fast the chip can take data in and out by an order of magnitude.

Chen Sun, a computer hardware researcher at UC Berkeley and the startup IR labs.

A metal pin on the memory chip in your computer might transmit at 1.6 gigabits per second.

Sun's optical connection ups that rate to 2.5 gigabits per second.

Not a huge difference on the face of it, but the killer app here is that multiple wavelengths of light,

up to 11, can be used simultaneously to send data through a single fiber, which means this technology

has potential speeds of 27.5 gigabits per second, more than an order of magnitude faster

than today's standard.

So that's the extra dimension that we have to scale bandwidth that we don't have with normal

electrical signals.

The findings appear in the journal Nature.

These chips with optical connections are not just high speed,

they also require less energy than the copper versions.

That could be a big deal, with server farms projected to outpace every other commercial use of electricity within the next decade.

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