There’s about $35M up for grabs if your circuits can beat today’s limits

It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics.

A recent solicitation from the Department of Defense's research arm - the Photonic Integrated Circuit Architectures for Scalable System Objectives (PICASSO) - aims to scale photonics beyond today’s narrow demonstrations. Citing the need for more capable photonic systems, including those relevant to artificial intelligence workloads, DARPA is calling on researchers to submit proposals showing how circuit-level design can overcome the fundamental limitations that constrain current photonic computing approaches, using today’s photonic components rather than waiting for new ones to be invented.

For those unfamiliar with photonic computing, it's the use of light instead of electrons to process and transmit data. If ...