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Japan’s TDK is claiming a breakthrough in optical technology that would process data 10 times faster than current electronics and solve a key bottleneck holding back the growth of generative artificial intelligence.
The Apple supplier says it has demonstrated the world’s first “spin photo detector”, combining optical, electronic and magnetic elements to create response times of 20 picoseconds, or 20 trillionths of a second, potentially replacing existing semiconductor-based photo detectors that transfer data between chips.
Hideaki Fukuzawa, senior manager of TDK’s next-generation products development centre, said the speed at which AI processors could transfer data was severely limited by current electronics.
“This data transfer is the biggest bottleneck for AI rather than the semiconductor GPU performance,” he said. “Since we can break through many of the current bottlenecks, we think this technology will be a game-changer for the AI and data centre industry.”
Arata Tsukamoto, an electrical engineering professor at Tokyo’s Nihon University, tested the new device for TDK as its research partner and said he believed “the spin photo detector holds remarkable promise, both from a scientific and technological perspective”.
Data is currently transferred between processors by electrical signals, but the large volumes in AI require a shift towards optical technology because light travels faster.
TDK plans further tests to confirm continuous light at ultra-high speeds, before providing samples to customers by the end of March 2026 and entering mass production in the next three to five years.
Despite the immaturity of the technology and the major challenge of building an ecosystem for the tech with integrated circuit designers, TDK believes its device could have a cost advantage over other solutions by reducing the number of wafer processes.
TDK supplies batteries for the iPhone, but it has adapted its magnetic heads technology for hard disc drives to achieve the photonics breakthrough.
Its new device also uses less power — another key issue in AI data centre expansion. Smart glasses for augmented and virtual reality and high-speed image sensors are also potential future markets for the technology.
The device is part of the photonic integrated circuits market, set to expand more than tenfold over the next decade to $54.5bn due to generative AI’s demands, according to forecasts by tech research group IDTechEx.
Major AI companies have also been striving to develop transceivers that integrate optical technology into their chip packages and TDK’s tech would be a challenger to such next-generation silicon photonics.
The world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is making a push, aiming for production within five years.
Nvidia also signalled the importance of solving the data transfer bottleneck when it paid $7bn in 2020 to acquire Israel’s Mellanox Technologies, a specialist in enabling efficient connections between networks, systems and data centres.
