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Developing first petahertz-speed phototransistor in ambient conditions

Developing first petahertz-speed phototransistor in ambient conditions

5 comments

·May 25, 2025
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robin_reala

Discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44083474

rcostin2k2

Well, Intel announced the first terahertz transistor over two decades ago, but there's still no terahertz processor. I wouldn't hold my breath for a petahertz one anytime soon.

onion2k

I wouldn't hold my breath for a petahertz one anytime soon.

That depends on what you mean by 'processor'. Optical systems are great at linear processing, but terrible at nonlinearity. You wouldn't want an optical processor based CPU to run Doom. Encoding something like an AI model or a codec into an optical processor would be great though.

One Google search later.. Turns out a team have made a photonic tensor processor. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03070-1 So you could have an even fast one of those.

petra

The speed limits are because of the latency of the wires and the issue of heat

k__

Maybe the new ARM architectures will deliver.