When the laser was first invented in the 1960s it was a case of ‘that’s great mate, but what are we going to do with it?’
Now we’re looking at using lasers to help replace electronics with the much faster photonics we’ve come a long way since those early days.
The main use of photonics is in the telecommunications industry. Optic fibres are a fraction of the cost of copper cables and can carry much more. The first undersea optic fibre could carry more information than the total of all the copper communications cables ever made.
These days the internet gets faster every year by taking advantage of the ongoing advances in photonics. It’s now possible to have interactive TV or a lightning fast, affordable net connection in your house by running an optic fibre all the way to your door.
But it’s not just the communications industry that benefits from this new technology. Everything from speed cameras to medicine, smoke detectors to supermarket scanners, weather prediction to scaring birds from runways has a use for photonics.
By replacing electronics with photonics we’ll have circuits that use light instead of electricity. Computers that run on light will be able to run at incredible speeds. Artificial intelligence, realistic virtual reality, it’s all finally just round the corner.
by Dave Budden