7th January 2021 9:51 am A multinational team of researchers has developed a photonic processor that uses light instead of electronics and could help usher in a new dawn in computing. Current computing relies on electrical current passed through circuitry on ever-smaller chips, but in recent years this technology has been bumping up against its physical limits. To facilitate the next generation of computation-hungry technology such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, researchers have been searching for new methods to process and store data that circumvent those limits, and photonic processors are the obvious candidate. Featuring scientists from the Universities of Oxford, Münster, Exeter, Pittsburgh, École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) and IBM Research Europe, the team developed a new approach and processor architecture.