IEEE Spectrum recently summarized a major breakthrough out of DARPA’s Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM) program:
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Linking Chips With Light
Posted in computing, innovation
Batteries are great, except that they take a long time to charge. When you are dealing with a lot of batteries, you have to have a lot of time to charge them. But what if you could reduce the charging time by adding more batteries? Sounds unreal? Probably, but that is what scientists at the University of Adelaide are going to try to achieve by creating world’s first quantum battery.
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Compositional grading of colloidal quantum dots enables electrically driven amplification of light, bringing electrically driven lasers from these materials very close.
LED lights have been working on overcoming two challenges: Generating pleasing light, and being low-cost. QD Vision and Nexxus Lighting have been working together on the first of these. Nexxus made LED lamps with white LEDs, and QD Vision is providing a cover with a coating of specially tuned quantum dots that help make the light-color more pleasing to the eye (mostly by adding some red into the mix, making the final result closer to what people are used to).
Photo: Mark Lennihan
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Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners have demonstrated an experimental, next-generation atomic clock — ticking at high “optical” frequencies — that is much smaller than usual, made of just three small chips plus supporting electronics and optics.
Described in Optica, the chip-scale clock is based on the vibrations, or “ticks,” of rubidium atoms confined in a tiny glass container, called a vapor cell, on a chip. Two frequency combs on chips act like gears to link the atoms’ high-frequency optical ticks to a lower, widely used microwave frequency that can be used in applications.
The chip-based heart of the new clock requires very little power (just 275 milliwatts) and, with additional technology advances, could potentially be made small enough to be handheld. Chip-scale optical clocks like this could eventually replace traditional oscillators in applications such as navigation systems and telecommunications networks and serve as backup clocks on satellites.
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Greg Dore at the Kirby Institute of NSW participated in Australia’s Hepatitis C pricing discussions, and believes our model will work for the new gene therapy drugs – notwithstanding their eye-popping price tags – and the fact that the patient populations for these rare genetic diseases will be tiny.
However, the real reason companies are getting into gene therapy is not just to treat rare disease. It’s because they realise this technology will be a game changer for medicine.
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