Light-based computers in development

Post by acjohnson55 » Thu, May 21, 2015, 1:31 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #4

> The key advantage of light, made of photo[n]s, is it’s the fastest thing you can use to transfer information according to the professor. I wish people would stop spreading this exaggeration. ~~Electrons~~ Electronic signals move at 0.66c. In practice 1c is unlikely to provide the most significant gains. The key benefit is actually the energy efficiency that the article barely mentions, as well as massive reduction…

Post by zeeed » Thu, May 21, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #10

> Light-based computers in development, to be millions of times faster When will we see this millions time faster computers commercially available? Maybe around the time when the thousands-times faster internet and 100 times larger batteries from articles I read years ago are available...

Post by TTPrograms » Thu, May 21, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

hvidgaard wrote: post #8

TTPrograms wrote: post #2

The main problem is still getting strong optical nonlinearity to build optical only transistors. Right now best case 1 in 100 photons will be affected by most "switches". There's been some research using various resonators to enhance the nonlinearities, but that's really the big problem to solve right now. There's also scaling issues - we have 20nm electrical switches, which is almost 50 times smaller than the wavele…

If efficiency is vastly improved, we can stack the layers and increase frequency by quite a bit. Even if the processor becomes a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, it's okay as a proof of concept. It's an interesting approach to overcome the inherient limitations of electron based circuits.