Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 58.
Optical computing (Courtesy of Coherent, Inc.)
Companies, universities and government laboratories are reporting new
developments in optical technology on a frequent basis. Amongst the
many research locations where this work is being carried out are the Uni-
versity of Southern California and the University of California at Los
Angeles, which have jointly developed a material that can switch 60 bil-
lion times per second (60 GigaHertz). Another collaborative effort, this
one at Brown University and IBM's Almaden Research Center, has used
ultra-fast laser pulses to build ultra-fast data storage devices, achieving
switching times as short as 100 picoseconds (i.e., their optical logic gates
