Technology is alive. New discoveries and inventions appear almost everyday and we all should be ready to get used to objects that we can even imagine now. The world of computing software develops really fast and sometimes we do not have time to be proficiency in the use of certain devices before having to change to other way of doing things.
Not many years ago science fiction films showed us people obeying the commands of a chip that someone placed on their brains, and heroes who could know things from others thanks to a kind of computer in their eyes. But that is not science fiction anymore. It is true that the evolution of technology is not exactly the same, but we are really close to those things that many filmakers imagined.
Optical chips are now a reallity. A group of scientists is working in the University of Valencia, in Spain, in order to get reconfigurable optical chips. As the magazine Nature Photonics tells in one of its articles, these scientists are currently working on a prototype manufactured on Indium Phosphide with the aim of getting an optical chip with two functionalities: filter and immediate frequency measurement. These scientists expect to get more complex chips by the end of the year with five or six functionalities using the same hardware configuration.
The creation of this type of chips is a complete revolution for telecommunications as optical chips will have great effectiveness. The fact of having reconfigurable chips will allow people to use the same hardware platform to create different chips, unlike now that scientists need to create three different chips out of three different platforms.
Professor Capmany, director of these studies in Spain, assures that this innovative chips will be very useful in several fields such as biomedicine or telecomunications, specially for 5G communications. These new chips will offer more powerful, smaller base stations with less power consumption.
Optical chips will be a reality by the end of the year, do you dare to talk about which hardware will be developed in 2017?
