First self-calibrating programmable photonic chip unveiled

An international team led by Australian scientists has developed the first self-calibrating photonic chip, which can "transform" into a bridge on the data highway, change the current connection between optical chips, increase the speed of data transmission, and is expected to promote the development of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. The latest research was published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Photonic circuits can manipulate and guide light channels for information transmission, and can also provide computing capabilities such as searching for patterns, which is the basis for many applications such as medical diagnosis, self-driving vehicles, and Internet security. Rapid and reliable reprogramming of chips can speed up the search, but it is very difficult and extremely expensive to do so. The latest self-calibrating chips overcome this problem.

A key challenge of this research is to integrate all optical functions into a device that can be "plugged" into existing infrastructure. The solution proposed by the research team is to calibrate the chip after it is manufactured, that is, to calibrate the chip using an integrated reference path rather than external equipment, which provides all the settings and switch functions needed to "dial".

Lead researcher Professor Arthur Lowery of Monash University said: "We have demonstrated a self-calibrating programmable photonic filter chip. Self-calibration is very important because it enables tunable photonic integrated circuits to be used in a wide range of applications, such as optical communication systems that switch signals based on color, extremely fast correlators, scientific instruments for chemical or biological analysis and even astronomy."

Lowery said that in 2020, the school developed a new type of optical micro-communication chip, which built multiple channels of data highways and achieved the fastest network speed at that time. The newly launched self-calibrated chips can become the entrances, exit ramps and bridges of these data highways, connecting these channels and enabling more data to move faster.

Researchers said this latest breakthrough is expected to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence and be applied to a number of real-world areas, such as safer driverless cars that can interpret their surroundings in a timely manner, artificial intelligence that can diagnose diseases more quickly, and smaller photonic network switches.