i.e. Smoke
Sound
Space
What am trying to figure out is, these microchips, if we sort of filled them with the correct substances, could it be a light(faf) signal, rather than an electronic one(creates more heat), used in comms.
Am not trying to be specific about any medium, I'm wanting to explore the development of quicker and more economical Gadgets.
Suggestion:
I'm not sure your exact point.
Different mediums will attenuate light signals to a different degree. If you could vary that attenuation by varying the medium, it would be possible to encode data onto the light signal but that is a bit crude and too small a scale to be very useful. Whatever you do to reduce the light intensity also reduces its range.
The core telecommunications network is already mostly optical, using laser chips to send signals along optical fibres. It is even possible to amplify light signals directly by passing the signal through an arrangement of erbium doped fibres. Some cable customers have fibre optics running right into their homes as do a very few normal telecomms users. Rather than using attenuated light, it is pulsed on and off incredibly quickly to send data digitally.
A great aspect of optical fibre is that it will carry multiple streams of laser light at the same time and they will not interfere with each other. If you take multiple input sources, you can encode them, chop them up into tiny slices, mix them together with other encoded slices from other signals, send the mixed up stream via a single laser source, and unscramble everything at the other end. It's called multiplexing. So, you can have hundreds of laser beams, each carrying hundreds of multiplexed signals, all sending their data down one optical fibre. Now THAT is neat!
Some non-telecommunications gadgets use optical data pathways – I currently have an optical input from my hi-fi to the sound card on my computer. Minidisc players, CD players and DVD players all use optical devices to read/write data. Perhaps you are thinking of something different. If so, I wonder if you clarify your question. Thanks.
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