In its work, the team combined phase-change materials with specially designed integrated photonic circuits to deliver a biological-like synaptic response. Crucially, it claims, these photonic synapses can operate 1000 faster than those of the human brain.
Professor Harish Bhaskaran from Oxford University said “The development of computers that work more like the human brain has been a Holy Grail of scientists for decades. Via a network of neurons and synapses, the brain can process and store vast amounts of information simultaneously, using only a few tens of Watts. Conventional computers can’t come close to this sort of performance.”
Exeter Professor David Wright, added: “Computers are relatively slow and the faster we make them, the more power they consume. Conventional computers are also pretty ‘dumb’, with none of the in-built learning and parallel processing capabilities of the human brain. We tackle both of these issues here – not only by developing not only new brain-like computer architectures, but also by working in the optical domain to leverage the huge speed and power advantages of the upcoming silicon photonics revolution.”