From a bench to a chip

What photonic chips do today

Data centres move data between servers on light. A silicon-photonic transceiver puts several wavelengths on one waveguide, each carrying its own bit stream. In Shine's version, four bits switch lasers at 1530–1560 nm, ring resonators add each colour to a shared waveguide, and matching rings at the receiver drop each one onto a detector that turns it back into a bit.

• Click the input bits and watch them arrive.
• Detune a receiver ring and its channel disappears.

Logic with light, as a teaching model

A full adder built from parts you can inspect: input bits drive phase shifters in an interferometer whose interference gives the sum, and a thresholded detector gives the carry. Eight of them make an 8-bit adder. It shows how light and electronics hand off, not how arithmetic is done in practice: research chips keep the carry in light, and photonics earns its place in links and linear algebra.

• Click a bit of either number and watch the result change.
• Press Tab on a full adder to open its optics.

Memory and a clock

Registers store their inputs on each clock tick, number inputs and displays connect a circuit to the outside, and function cells compute anything you can write as an expression over signals and received light. Feed an adder's result back into a register and it counts.

Free-space layouts

Place lasers, mirrors, beam splitters, phase shifters and detectors on a grid. Beams pick up phase over distance, so interference and cavity resonances come out right, not approximated by a fixed number of bounces.

Reusable components

Save any layout as a component with a name, initials and description. It becomes a box: light ports on its sides, signal terminals on top and bottom. Drop it anywhere and wire it up.

• Hover a box to read its description.
• Press Tab to open its definition in its own tab.
• Edits there update every place it is used.

Computing with light

Meshes of Mach–Zehnder interferometers perform linear algebra as light passes through. Shine programs them for you: a Fourier transform, a switch tree, or any matrix through its singular value decomposition.

Filters and wavelengths

Rings, interleavers and add–drop filters respond to wavelength. Several lasers can share a waveguide, and each colour is solved on its own. Sweep a design to see its spectrum, like this four-channel demultiplexer.