Getting to the next generation of supercomputer isn’t just a function of making everything go faster — it’s about making things go faster without requiring multiple nuclear power plants dedicated to running the new machines. That’s been a problem dogging the researchers trying to build the next generation exascale supercomputers for the last few years, but scientists at MIT have discovered a new type of on-chip information transport that replaces wires with light that might help the problem.

Yup, a researcher named Michael Watts (let’s just take a moment to appreciate how he is fulfilling the destiny offered by his name) has built an on-chip photonics transport technology that only requires one femtojoule to transfer a bit. A femtojoule is a measurement of how much energy it takes to transfer a bit of data, but isn’t directly comparable to watts.

You see, the wires that connect the transistors on a…