Innovation minister, senator Kim Carr, has officially kicked of a six year $23.8m research program into photonic chip technology at the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems. (CUDOS) that has the potential to revolutionise optical communications.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a way to grow nanolasers directly onto a silicon surface, which could lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors, as well as to powerful biochemical sensors that use optoelectronic chips.

IBM has unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, claiming that it will enable a 10X improvement in integration density over current manufacturing techniques and the creation of 1Tbps electro-optical transducers just a few millimetres square.

A seemingly impossible sparkle of green light from a silicon chip has opened up a whole new field of possibilities for communications devices, including exponentially shrinking the hardware needed to guarantee high quality Internet connection, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.  

A new study forecasts that demand for Internet bandwidth will grow by an order of magnitude in five years, straining current network architectures to the limit.

A development in photonic switching technology by University of Sydney scientists is being hailed as having the potential to make the Internet 60 times faster.

ABC NewsRadio, Australia’s only 24 hour continuous news service, has axed one of its longest running programs because it wants to divert funding elsewhere. The program? StarStuff, the only space, science, astronomy and cosmology show on Australian radio. What a shame!

Scientists at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center have created a nanophotonic switch so small that 2000 of them could fit into an area as small as one square millimetre. The development has implications for future multicore processor designs.