Future Technology[Daily Briefing] Light on a chip 💡 15m dental records gone 🦷 Chips hit $403bn 📈
Caltech just taught silicon to carry light almost as cleanly as glass fibre
Getting light to travel across a chip has always come with a tax. Every millimetre of on-chip waveguide scatters and absorbs a little of the beam, and at visible wavelengths the losses get bad enough that engineers have mostly given up and kept the interesting photonics off-chip, in bulky fibre and free-space optics.
A team at Caltech has now built ultra-low-loss optical pathways directly on silicon that get close to the performance of optical fibre, and comfortably beat anything else available at visible wavelengths. In practice that means a beam of visible light can now be routed around a chip without bleeding away most of its energy on the journey.
The visible-light part is what makes this interesting rather than merely impressive. Quantum computers built on trapped ions and neutral atoms need visible and near-visible light delivered with precision to individual atoms. So do the next generation of biosensors, medical imaging chips and augmented reality displays. All of those have been waiting on someone to solve the routing problem in a form you can actually mass produce on a standard silicon line.
Why it matters: Every quantum computing roadmap that relies on atoms or ions eventually hits the same wall, which is how to get thousands of precisely aimed laser beams into one box without the box becoming the size of a room. Moving that plumbing onto a chip is how the field escapes the lab bench. It is also a reminder that the chip race is not only about transistor counts. Whoever owns integrated photonics owns a big slice of what comes after.
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Quick hits
Chip sales just had a monster quarter. Global semiconductor sales hit $403.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 35.1% on Q1, and a SIA-Deloitte study reckons AI data centre chips alone could pull in over $1.2 trillion a year by 2028. More on FT
The largest healthcare breach of the year so far. DentaQuest, the second biggest dental insurer in the US, disclosed a May cyberattack that touched 15 million patients. Three months between breach and disclosure is the bit worth being annoyed about. More on FT
France lost 700,000 taxpayers' records. The French Finance Ministry confirmed an attack on its public finances directorate, with both individual and business taxpayer data taken. More on FT
DNA plus semiconductor equals a very odd memory chip. Researchers have paired synthetic DNA with semiconductor material to build an ultra-low-power device that stores and processes information in the same place, which is the holy grail everyone chasing in-memory computing keeps talking about. More on FT
Taiwan is pouring concrete for 2028. ASE subsidiary SPIL broke ground on a $3.1 billion advanced packaging and test plant in Douliu, adding CoWoS capacity for AI chips. Packaging, not lithography, is the current bottleneck. More on FT
Tool of the day: Anker Prime 250W charging base
Honest take first. Most people do not need a 250W desktop charger and should not buy one. But if you are the sort of person whose desk currently hosts four separate power bricks, a laptop charger, and a tangle you have stopped trying to fix, a single high-wattage base with multiple USB-C ports genuinely does clean things up. The Anker Prime line handles a laptop and three other devices at full speed without the usual drop-off when you plug in the fourth thing.
The catch is price. These sit at three to four times the cost of a decent 65W charger, and if your heaviest load is a phone and a pair of earbuds you are paying for headroom you will never touch. Buy it for the port count and the cable reduction, not the wattage number.
Quick one for you today. If integrated photonics does what Caltech's work suggests, the first consumer product to benefit will probably be something unglamorous rather than a quantum computer. My money is on medical sensors. What is yours? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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