Scientists team up

Scientists from Dow Corning and IBM teamed up to develop a new type of polymer material that enables transmission of light instead of electrical signals within supercomputers and data centers, the companies reported at SPIE Photonics West in February. This new material offers better physical properties, including robustness and flexibility, making it suitable for applications in Big Data and for developing future exascale computers, which can perform a billion computations per second. The photo shows a prototype waveguide made of the new material at the Binning and Roher Nanotechnology Center in Rueschlikon, Switzerland.