Issue 05 | May 2025
Forging New Frontiers
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lighting the path to faster, smarter AI
Bringing non-linearity into the light, a new photonic accelerator allows AI to compute and respond entirely in the optical domain.
A
s the world thirsts for faster, ever more efficient artificial intelligence (AI), the limits of silicon are beginning to rear their heads. Power-ravenous processors. Clogged interconnects. Algorithms that outpace the hardware meant to run them. It’s a bottleneck that’s hard to ignore — one that puts a cap on tech giants, and one that researchers are racing to break through.
Image above was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2