The new process replaces the wire circuitry used to relay information electronically, which could lead to the development of highly efficient, light-based computers. 

While the heavy lifting in computer processing takes place inside the chips, an analysis by Stanford professor of electrical engineering, David Miller, showed that up to 80 percent of a microprocessor's power is eaten up by the transmitting of data as a stream of electrons over wire interconnects. Basically, shipping requires far more energy than production, and chewing through all that power is the reason laptops heat up. 

Inspired by the optical technology of the internet, the researchers sought to move data between chips over fiber optic threads beaming photons of light. Besides using far less energy than traditional wire interconnects, chip-scale optic interconnects can carry more than 20 times more data.