A test production line is expected to be completed this year following Chinese breakthroughs in the development of a new type of computer chip - one that replaces electrons with light, making it incomparably faster than current chips, Wednesday's China Daily reported.
The production line will clear the bottleneck created by the physical limits of conventional chips, according to scientists in Shanghai who made the breakthroughs.
Preliminary testing confirms that the research group has mastered the means to make the chips, and orders are coming in domestically and from abroad, the group's leader said to the newspaper.
The chips are seen as particularly useful in fields relating to information transmission, such as smartphones, computers, autonomous vehicles and ultra high-definition TV. Processing speeds are dramatically improved while energy consumption is reduced.
"Individual end users will also notice big changes in their electronic gadgets - faster computers and mobile phones, and less time to download movies," Yu Mingbin, leader of the research group at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
"We're trying to build a library of devices, the most basic units in a chip," Yu said to the newspaper. "So whatever order we receive, we'll find a solution through some combination of the units."