Researchers at NTT and and Osaka University announced an important step toward photonic computation by developing a large-scale artificial spin network based on photonics technologies. The development targets a fundamental component for the coherent Ising machine (CIM), which utilizes interacting artificial spins realized with optical parametric oscillators (OPO) for computation of combinatorial optimization problems.
The researchers generated more than 10,000 time-multiplexed OPOs using an optical fiber cavity as long as 1 km.
The OPOs can be used as artificial spins for a large-scale CIM to solve combinatorial optimization problems in the real world. The research was published in the UK science journal “Nature Photonics” on April 18, 2006.
