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Photonics articles
Photonics
For the last two years the hardest thing to get in AI hardware was not the chip itself but the package around it. TSMC's CoWoS capacity has decided how many accelerators can ship. Now TSMC is reported to be weighing another price rise for that packaging, and on 2 November 2026 Marvell agreed to buy Lumentum for about $115 billion to get into optical interconnect. Together they show where the bottleneck is moving: from packaging to the links…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 03, 2026
Tutorials
An optical power meter measures how much light arrives at a point in a fibre link, using a photodiode that turns optical power into an electrical current, and shows the result in watts or dBm. Paired with a stable light source it also measures optical loss in dB, which is how installers prove a link is within its budget. Accurate results depend on setting the right wavelength, using clean connectors, choosing the correct reference method and usi…
by
The Editor's Desk
October 26, 2026
Special Reports
Co-packaged optics (CPO) places the optical engines that turn electrical signals into light on the same package as the switch or accelerator chip, instead of in pluggable modules at the front panel. It matters for AI because the clusters that train large models are now limited less by compute than by how much data they can move between chips, and by the power that movement costs. CPO cuts the copper path to a few millimetres, which saves a large…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 08, 2026
Tutorials
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V compound semiconductor made from gallium and arsenic. It matters because it does two things silicon does poorly: its electrons move about six times faster, which suits radio-frequency amplifiers and switches, and its direct bandgap lets it emit light efficiently, which suits LEDs, lasers and high-efficiency solar cells. Silicon still wins on cost, wafer size and integration density, so GaAs lives in the parts…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
June 24, 2025
Power Electronics
Image courtesy: Bing LED bulbs give the same light as incandescent bulbs for roughly a sixth of the power and last many times longer, so they cost more to buy but far less to own. CFLs sit in between: about a quarter of the power of an incandescent bulb, a shorter life than LEDs, and a small amount of mercury inside. For almost every home and office use today, LED is the right choice; incandescent bulbs still win only on perfect colour render…
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Murugavel Ganesan
September 16, 2023
Photonics
Chinese telecommunications equipment company ZTE Corp. claims to have broken the world record for a single-channel data transmission with a rate of 10 terabits per second over 640-kilometers of optical fiber. This is the equivalent of sending 160 high definition movies every second. More here.
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 24, 2011
Photonics
Specially designed molecules could lead to all-optical data switches that could make the Internet far faster. New molecules produced at Georgia Tech could enable engineers to build all-optical data routers, ultimately leading to transmission speeds as high as two terabits--or 2,000 gigabits--per second. Today's fastest commercial routers switch data at 40 gigabits per second. Follow the links for more info.
by
Murugavel Ganesan
March 04, 2010
Special Reports
Development of semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronic systems; The Nobel Prize in Physics 2000. Zhores I. Alferov was born in Vitebsk, Belorussia, USSR, on March 15, 1930. In 1952, he graduated from the Department of Electronics of V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad. Since 1953 he has been a staff member of the Physico-Technical Institute where he held consecutively the following positio…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
February 02, 2009
