Optical Sciences Centre at Swinburne and co-lead of the research

 This breakthrough was achieved with optical micro-combs,” said David Moss, director of the Optical Sciences Centre at Swinburne and co-lead of the research. The same technology, Moss said, was used to achieve the all-time record-setting internet speeds reported by Swinburne and partnered institutions last May. 

“In the 10 years since I co-invented them, integrated micro-comb chips have become enormously important and it is truly exciting to see them enabling these huge advances in information communication and processing,” Moss said. “Micro-combs offer enormous promise for us to meet the world’s insatiable need for information.”

Essentially, the small, light, and – crucially – cheap micro-combs each contain hundreds of high-quality lasers, enabling much faster transfers of information: in the fiber internet use case, computer science vs computer engineering, a single micro comb supplanted 80 individual lasers. For the neuromorphic chip use case, a single micro-comb-enabled processor was used to simultaneously assess the data across multiple dimensions, a task the researchers say would have required tens of thousands of parallel processors when performed using the comparably powerful Google TPU.