A new 'permanent' light-switch chip can be flipped 140 million times without breaking, paving the way for computers that run on light.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
High-Endurance, Low-loss Sb2Se3 Optical Switches on Silicon Nitride using Transparent Conductive Heaters
arXiv · 2604.11649
The Takeaway
To build computers that use light instead of electricity, we need 'switches' that can store data without needing constant power. This paper describes a new optical switch that can be flipped over 140 million times—a massive leap in durability over previous versions. It also has 'multi-level' operation, meaning a single switch can store more than just a 0 or a 1. This is the hardware that will allow for high-speed, low-energy AI chips that don't get hot. For regular people, this means your future phone or laptop could be 1,000 times faster but have a battery that lasts for weeks because it’s processing data with photons instead of thirsty electrons.
From the abstract
We report an electrically actuated, low-loss non-volatile optical switch based on the phase-change material (PCM) Sb2Se3 integrated on a silicon nitride (Si3N4) platform. The device is fabricated using an 8-inch wafer-scale process flow, demonstrating the feasibility of scalable manufacturing for photonic integrated circuits (PICs). By employing transparent indium tin oxide (ITO) micro-heaters, reversible switching between the amorphous and crystalline states is achieved with an extinction ratio