Lighting the Way to Computing: Optical communications could be a boon for data centers.

It is always very exciting to see how an innovation can transform our life; with this MIT Technology Review ,we can discover how optical communications could be a boon for data centers, reducing electricity use and heat buildup by replacing electronic signals with light signals.

 But according to the same review, the technology has been cost-effective only over distances of a kilometer or more, and using it in data centers would mean sending
signals mere meters or centimeters.

Conectikpeople can discover that when laser light is sent into a ring, it races around the ring over and over before a bit of it emerges through a waveguide at the bottom. Poon realized she could control the amount of light that emerges by simply controling the gateway between the ring and the rest of the chip.

The solution : new optical modulators with microscopic loop-the-loops through which light can shuttle data between servers and even from chip to chip within a single server.