New Photonic Chip Can Calculate The Best Shape Of Light

Light is sensitive to obstacles of any kind - even small ones can block its propagation. This effect is very similar to that of a beam carrying a data stream in an optical wireless system: the information, while still present, is completely distorted and extremely difficult to recover.
A recent study by the Politecnico di Milano, together with the Istituto Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa, the University of Glasgow and Stanford University, has made it possible to create photonic chips capable of mathematically calculating the optimal shape of light. These photonic chips can pass through any environment, even unknown or time-varying ones, and ultimately optimize the light profile in "any environment".
The work is published in a paper in Nature Photonics.
Minimum size, maximum efficiency
Milan led the research that led to the development of the devices - small silicon chips that act as smart transceivers. Working in pairs, they can automatically and independently work out what shape a beam of light needs to be in order to pass through the general environment with maximum efficiency.
They can also generate multiple overlapping beams, each with its own shape, and direct them without interfering with each other; in this way, transmission capacity is greatly increased, as required for next-generation wireless communication systems.
Francesco Morichetti, head of the Photonic Devices Laboratory at the Politecnico di Milano, commented, "Our chips are mathematical processors that perform optical calculations very quickly and efficiently, consuming almost no energy."
"The light beams are generated by simple algebraic operations, essentially sums and multiplications, which are performed directly on the optical signals and transmitted by micro-antennas integrated on the chip. This technology has many advantages: extremely easy to handle, highly energy-efficient, with a huge bandwidth of more than 5,000 GHz."
Andrea Melloni, Director of Polifab, the Center for Micro and Nanotechnology at Politecnico di Milano, said, "Today, all information is digital. But the fact is that images, sounds and all data are essentially analog. Digitization does enable very complex processing, but as the amount of data increases, these operations become increasingly unsustainable in terms of energy and computation. There is a lot of interest in returning to analog technology through dedicated circuits (analog coprocessors), which will be the enabler for future 5G and 6G wireless interconnected systems. This is how our chips work."
Marc Sorel, Professor of Electronics at the TeCIP Institute of Higher Education in Santa Ana, said, "Analog computing using optical processors is critical in many application scenarios, including mathematical gas pedals for neuromorphic systems, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, quantum computers and cryptography, advanced positioning, localization, and sensor systems, as well as in all systems that require high-speed processing of large amounts of data."