Logic-in-Light™ · Clean Compute Centers · Licensing & Programs
A conventional processor works by pushing electric current through billions of transistors to make them change state. Every one of those state changes deposits heat. True Photonic changes state with light.
Logarithmic · Gold band = independently measured range
The operational regime of a conventional processor — clock period, memory access, the latency a computation actually experiences.
The range came off a test series at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, measured by pump-probe spectroscopy. A range from a test series is a finding, and the range is the value. This is the only performance figure on this site that has been measured rather than modeled.
Our purpose
To put the world's computing on light — on fabs that already exist, in buildings already standing, and without the water.
What we build
Two things had to be invented: a switch that changes state with light, and a family of logic gates built from those switches. The architecture, the fabrication strategy, and the compute centers all follow from what those two do and what they stop doing.
Dr. Gary Poovey's switch changes state with light rather than with electric current. Measured independently at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology by pump-probe spectroscopy, that state change takes 150 to 200 femtoseconds.
Because nothing is pushed through a channel to make the state change happen, the switch does not deposit the heat a transistor deposits. That is the step that lets everything downstream of it work differently.
Read the technology brief →We speak most about the switch, because the switch is what replaces the transistor. Those skilled in the art know that a switch on its own is insufficient to build a computer.
True Photonic holds the intellectual property for an entire Boolean gate family in the optical domain: NAND, OR, XOR, flip-flop, and the rest. Existing logic designs and topologies map across to it rather than being reinvented from scratch.
Read about the gate family →Photonic servers built from the switch, fabricated at mature 90 to 180 nanometer process geometry. No extreme ultraviolet lithography, no leading-edge allocation, and no dependency on the handful of fabs in the world that can do either. Capacity at those nodes is abundant, largely depreciated, geographically distributed, and domestic.
Clock frequency is a choice we are proving rather than a specification we are stuck with: whether the architecture holds its throughput at one gigahertz is one of the questions the demonstrator answers.
Read the architecture brief →A photonic compute floor needs no cooling plant, no cooling water, no dedicated substation, and no place in an interconnect queue. The load divides near rack scale, so it can be fitted across the electrical panels and floors a building already has rather than requiring service built to match it.
That is what lets compute sit inside the commercial buildings standing empty in American downtowns, near the people and the workloads it serves.
Explore Clean Compute Centers →Our proof standard
Our chief technical officer would rather answer after the testbed measures it. We would rather publish his floor than our ceiling. Every figure we put in front of a counterparty carries the tier it belongs to, and we do not move a number up a tier because a room wants it there.
Where it lands
One switch, one substrate, and one fabrication strategy sit underneath all of them. The map keeps extending.
Each cell links to its Industry View report. Volume numbers follow the series; display order leads with Clean Compute Centers.
Publishing
Our research, publishing and community arm. Industry View reports, a book, a community, and near-daily writing that works through what a photonic floor changes underneath each industry.