Making it more certain that those sceptical about the potential of optical computing – among them, it seems, IBM – will be confounded, AT&T Co’s Bell Laboratories says that it has succeeded in shrinking the tabletop microcontroller comparable optical processor that it demonstrated earlier this year (CI No 1,358) onto a quartz glass disk 1 in diameter and 0.125 thick. It demonstrated the device at an optical computing conference in Kobe, Japan, and says that it is easily manufacturable. The feat required AT&T to create what it claims to be the world’s smallest laser, and the mirrors and lenses of the mock-up it showed earlier are now features etched into the quartz, using a technique AT&T calls diffractive optics. Initially, AT&T sees such devices used in the speed-critical parts of supercomputers, but it is believed to be close to introducing optical processing elements into its telephone network.
