At the core of the device is a photonic crystal slide which basically turns the iPhone into a high-resolution spectrometer.
In order to make a photonic crystal, though, the materials have to be organised into structures no more than a wavelength of light apart.
Infinera's optical routing gear is built around an all-in-one optical networking chip--which it calls a Photonic Integrated Circuit--that shrinks down the work done by a hodgepodge of parts in boxes from other vendors onto a pair of chips smaller than a fingernail.
The other, which faces a specialised type of solar cell made of a material called indium gallium arsenide, is sculpted into a structure called a photonic crystal that causes it to emit infra-red radiation selectively at the frequency best absorbed by the cell.
Holman talked about the technology and projects underway in Africa to reduce malaria through the creation of a Photonic Fence as well as ways to tackle the world energy crisis by addressing nuclear energy via TerraPower. (See a full list of the projects at Intellectual Ventures here).
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Lin, an expert in nanostructure photonics and a pioneer in the field of photonic crystals, says that the new coating could be applied to just about any photovoltaic material.
The mechanical prototype is a demonstration of Intel's photonic rack architecture for interconnecting the various resources, showing one of the ways compute, network and storage resources can be disaggregated within a rack.
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Rattner explained that the new architecture is based on more than a decade's worth of research to invent a family of silicon-based photonic devices, including lasers, modulators and detectors using low-cost silicon to fully integrate photonic devices of unprecedented speed and energy efficiency.
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Last month, in conjunction with Shawn-Yu Lin of the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the group showed that photonic crystals can guide light on a far smaller scale than was previously possible.
Mario Napolitano of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have now demonstrated a way to break this so-called Heisenberg limit.
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