This week we’re talking about photonics. My guests are Tim McKenna and Ryo Yanagimoto from the Physics and Informatics Laboratories at NTT.

Tim and I chat about balancing theoretical physics with real-world applications at NTT, his most exciting photonics projects, and the primary obstacles to replacing traditional electronics with photonics technologies.

Ryo and I dig into the game-changing potential of NTT’s programmable photonics chips. We discuss how their unique reconfigurability is shaking up traditional hardware manufacturing, facilitating a move from power-hungry electrical processing toward light-driven computation, even allowing chips to self-correct for environmental shifts.