I think we have different definitions as to what constitutes a large array. The ability to create photonic arrays is much more limited than what we have in el

I think we have different definitions as to what constitutes a large array. The ability to create photonic arrays is much more limited than what we have in elections. This is due to the rather large size of the elements (~0.3mm per device) as well as the fact that there there is loss in each element. Such a device would be ~76mm on one side. That’s not including any other elements or devices including optical coupling for light sources (no native lasers in silicon). The other dimension could be smaller but will have practical limits due to thermal and/or cross-talk between elements depending on the technology used. Optical computing is analog so the cascaded loss matters. If we assume a 1x256 array and we biased the MZMs such that we propagated a “1” to the end of the array and assume each MZM only has 0.12dB of loss; it would have 30dB of loss at the other end. So the “1” would have 1000x less power at the far end. This is only a toy problem to show how things would scale in a very simple way. In reality these devices will have much more loss per device.