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100-lane expressway for light: China's optical chip hits record speeds

An expressway of light - SIOM’s new soliton microcomb chip splits a laser into over 100 data lanes to achive 2,560 TOPS.

Project leader Xie Peng likens it to replacing a single-lane road with a hundred-lane expressway, which means that data throughput soars even though the physical footprint and clock speed stay the same. The trick is made possible by soliton microcomb sources, tiny ring-shaped resonators that split a continuous laser into a series of evenly spaced spectral “teeth.” Each tooth carries an independent stream of bits. SIOM reports an optical bandwidth wider than 40 nm, low insertion loss, and fully reconfigurable routing, enabling the chip to tackle tasks ranging from image recognition to real-time signal processing.

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