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Developed: World's 1st ultra-high parallel optical computing chip

In a landmark moment for IT world, Chinese scientists have unveiled the world's first ultra-high parallel optical computing integrated chip

Tuesday July 1, 2025 11:29 AM, Technology Desk

In a landmark moment for IT world, Chinese scientists have unveiled the world's first ultra-high parallel optical computing integrated chip.

The new ultra-high parallel optical computing IC has been developed by the researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Computing Power

The new chip is capable of delivering a theoretical peak computing power of 2560 TOPS (Tera operations per second) at a 50 GHz optical clock speed, a metric that reportedly benchmarks against NVIDIA's advanced GPU chips, the state-run China Global Television Network reported.

The Beijing based CGTN in a report said, the new chip offers a new ultra-high parallel photonic computing architecture featuring large bandwidth (over 40 nm), low loss and reconfigurable properties, thus enhancing the chip's computing power.

The Chinese researchers used soliton microcomb sources, which provide over 100 wavelength channels, for the development of the ultra high computing processor.

"100-Wavelength Multiplexing"

Unlike traditional optical computing that uses a single wavelength, this ultra-parallel approach leverages over 100 separate light wavelengths to process data streams simultaneously – boosting computing power by up to 100 times without increasing chip size or frequency, according to the study.

"We've achieved information interaction and computation with over 100-wavelength multiplexing on an optical chip, demonstrating high-density on-chip information parallel processing," Xie Peng, a researcher at SIOM, said.

The findings of the study were published last week in the journal eLight, titled "Parallel Optical Computing Capable of 100-Wavelength Multiplexing".

"It's like transforming a single-lane highway into a super highway capable of handling a hundred vehicles in parallel, greatly increasing throughput per unit time without changing the chip hardware," said Han Xilin, an engineer at SIOM.

Benefits and Applications

Optical computing has natural advantages of high frequency, high parallelism and large bandwidth.

It offers significant potential for enhancing computing density and power through increased parallelism.

This parallel optical computing architecture holds broad application prospects in fields like artificial intelligence and data centers", Beijing based CGTN said in its report.

Optical computing is game changer for embodied intelligence, neural networks, physical simulations and image processing.

Moreover, the low-latency characteristics of photonic computing make it ideal for edge devices with small data volumes but high latency requirements, such as communication exchange networks and drone swarms.

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