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Why not? Could you develop why it could not replace transistors.

by nnx 6y ago

octoberfranklin 6y ago
Read the article: photons don't interact with each other. Electrons do. Photons are great for communicating. We still don't know how to use them to do computing without first transferring back into the electrical domain. Edit: in a certain sense, this work hasn't solved that problem, it' just transfers to the thermal domain instead of to the electrical domain.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > We still don't know how to use them to do computing without first transferring back into the electrical domain This isn't entirely true. We do know in a general way how to perform computation using photons and non-linear optics. Electrons are involved as they are an essential part of a non-linear optical medium. But the information being processed is not converted to the electrical domain, and there's no electricity involved. The electrons remain bound to their atoms, not mobile like current charge carriers.
  - octoberfranklin 6y ago
    > Electrons are involved as they are an essential part of a non-linear optical medium. But the information being processed is not converted to the electrical domain That's a matter of hair-splitting. More importantly, it hasn't been used to make practical gates. "Nonlinear optics" has had plenty of important successes in (electrically controlled) amplification and frequency shifting, and those victories make our lives better every day in the way they've improved fiber optics, especially CWDM. However all-optical switching is still pretty much vaporware. I think it's really disengenuous to lump optical switching in with the broader field of nonlinear optics -- this basically just hides the glaring lack of progress in all-optical switching among the victories in neighboring fields. So we get a lot of advocacy of the form "hey you should believe all-optical switching will happen some day because this neigboring field that doesn't make gates is under the same umbrella as us!"
smaddox 6y ago
The range of light wavelengths that can reasonably be used for computation is in the hundreds (or thousands) of nanometers. Even the most optimistic approaches for confining such light to small areas, plasmonics, can only realistically give you something like a 10-fold size reduction, putting you at tens of nanometers. The transistors and wires in advanced process nodes have been smaller than that for quite some time, now. Moore's Law is about density. Photon gates cannot compete with electron gates in terms of density.

Why not? Could you develop why it could not replace transistors.

by nnx 6y ago

Why not? Could you develop why it could not replace transistors.

Read the article: photons don't interact with each other. Electrons do. Photons are great for communicating. We still don't know how to use them to do computing without first transferring back into the electrical domain. Edit: in a certain sense, this work hasn't solved that problem, it' just transfers to the thermal domain instead of to the electrical domain.

jlokier 6y ago
> We still don't know how to use them to do computing without first transferring back into the electrical domain This isn't entirely true. We do know in a general way how to perform computation using photons and non-linear optics. Electrons are involved as they are an essential part of a non-linear optical medium. But the information being processed is not converted to the electrical domain, and there's no electricity involved. The electrons remain bound to their atoms, not mobile like current charge carriers.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  > Electrons are involved as they are an essential part of a non-linear optical medium. But the information being processed is not converted to the electrical domain That's a matter of hair-splitting. More importantly, it hasn't been used to make practical gates. "Nonlinear optics" has had plenty of important successes in (electrically controlled) amplification and frequency shifting, and those victories make our lives better every day in the way they've improved fiber optics, especially CWDM. However all-optical switching is still pretty much vaporware. I think it's really disengenuous to lump optical switching in with the broader field of nonlinear optics -- this basically just hides the glaring lack of progress in all-optical switching among the victories in neighboring fields. So we get a lot of advocacy of the form "hey you should believe all-optical switching will happen some day because this neigboring field that doesn't make gates is under the same umbrella as us!"

smaddox 6y ago

The range of light wavelengths that can reasonably be used for computation is in the hundreds (or thousands) of nanometers. Even the most optimistic approaches for confining such light to small areas, plasmonics, can only realistically give you something like a 10-fold size reduction, putting you at tens of nanometers. The transistors and wires in advanced process nodes have been smaller than that for quite some time, now. Moore's Law is about density. Photon gates cannot compete with electron gates in terms of density.