"The Fourier transform is a well-known mathematical trick that can in essence extract the different colours from an input beam, based solely on the times that the different parts of the beam arrive.
The team does this optically - rather than mathematically, which at these data rates would be impossible - by splitting the incoming beam into different paths that arrive at different times, recombining them on a detector."
At the speed of light, the latency impact of an optical implementation of the Fourier transform operating within the confines of an equipment rack should be negligible. In this case it sounds like they intend to implement the optical computation directly on a silicon chip.
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"The Fourier transform is a well-known mathematical trick that can in essence extract the different colours from an input beam, based solely on the times that the different parts of the beam arrive.
The team does this optically - rather than mathematically, which at these data rates would be impossible - by splitting the incoming beam into different paths that arrive at different times, recombining them on a detector."
This is cool, and makes sense.
This sounds a bit like buffering, what impact would something like that have on latency I wonder.
At the speed of light, the latency impact of an optical implementation of the Fourier transform operating within the confines of an equipment rack should be negligible. In this case it sounds like they intend to implement the optical computation directly on a silicon chip.
Since the process is 'optical' in nature, the latency will be very low. 'Almost' equal to the speed of light in this case. ;)