On February 28, Beijing University's Changlin research team, in collaboration with the Academy of Aerospace Information Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, successfully developed the world's first photonic clock chip, which can increase the time regulation speed on the chip by 100 times.

This achievement can greatly improve the performance of a series of practical applications such as intelligent computing, 6G communication, and space remote sensing in the future.

According to reports, traditional chips rely on electronic oscillators to generate clock signals and obtain high-speed information processing capabilities, but the power consumption and heat are very high, and a clock can only produce a certain frequency range, and different applications require completely different chips.

The photonic chip technology developed this time generates clock signals through photons, which is much faster than electronic clocks.

The key is to "transform" the "optical frequency comb" technology, which in the past relied on expensive imported equipment, which cost millions of yuan.

The new achievement successfully realized the "optical frequency comb" technology on the chip, by building a racetrack-shaped ring on the chip, let the light fly in it.

The time of each lap of light, as the standard on-chip clock, is usually only a few billionths of a second, so the photon clock can be controlled at super high speed.

The experiment found that only one photonic clock chip can cover all the clocks in the microwave frequency band, so it can support mobile phone communication from 5G to 6G, or even higher speed, and no longer needs to change the terminal for each upgrade of the communication scheme.

Another important application of this technology is to increase the frequency of computing, the current CPU, GPU, etc., is generally only 2-6GHz, and the photonic clock chip has achieved more than 100GHz!