https://phys.org/news/2019-09-topological-insulator-reroutes-photonic-traffic.html There are all kinds of newly discovered alternatives to electronics, including spintronics, valleytronics, and many more, but optics are something we have a few centuries of experience with, and the obvious choice for something that is roughly a million times faster and more efficient that electricity and electronics. This optical router relies on a quantum property of the collective geometry of the rings themselves, in whatever material they are using, which can allow light to make even a 90 degree turn without slowing down, and can totally ignore any minor flaws in the ring to keep working like a champ. Earlier this year someone came up with another way to use this same idea for creating a processor that could work with such a router to entirely change the way both our computers and internet work. You can think of this chip as a have a top and bottom layer, with the top layer composed of nanodot lasers, that shine down on the rings. The two are so close together and the topological protection of the bottom layer is so robust it requires almost no light to go from one to the other and trigger a meaningful response. In the processor designed, the laser triggered a magnetic domain underneath a little cone antenna, allowing it to serve as either memory or a transistor gate, while this router would allow the chip to communicate at the speed of light. Already you could cheaply and easily put a router chip just like this one shown on any SoC or interposer and connect all the memory and processors and graphics or whatever at the speed of light. AMD does this currently with their I/O chip that, of course, is conventional electronics. Ideally, you would want this built into the interposer itself and used to send both power and data to any chip stacked on top, but interposers are big and tend to break and its just cheaper and easier and you get about the same benefits from just using a central router chiplet. Adding one chip like this to a SoC could easily make your computer several hundred times faster, fast enough that you will never notice it slow down no matter what you throw at it, because anything that requires more power than a couple of Star Trek holodecks can produce, is sent to the cloud. One chip to rule them all! That uses less than 5 watts of power and can have a nine foot optical cable that never requires amplification. You could use chips like this to wire an entire airplane or car or whatever in five minutes flat. Combined with something like a terahertz network, or wimpy infrared, you could easily get internet speeds in the terabytes per second range. It takes light about a second to go all the way around the earth, and the telecoms will jump all over this technology like flies on hot shit. Light moves so damned fast, you don't really need a computer in your computer, and it can work as just a router, using a chip like this one.
Frequency combs have been around for decades, and multiplexing an optical signal has be done for decades now, but picking out the one signal you want has proven elusive, while this holds the promise of being able to keep track of each signal as it is input, so you can find route to its destination at the other end of the line. How long it might take to do that is anyone's guess, but this chip is the first step in that direction. Multiplexing is how telephone lines carry more than one signal, while an optical equivalent would be capable of multiplex magnitudes larger number of signals on a single fiber optic. Today's fiber optics are more like hybrid telegraph wires in comparison.
