2 replies to this topic

[CyberMisterBeauty]

People,I was searching on google about photonic computing,which processors and computers would use light(photons)instead of electricity to work.Scientists says that optical computers could be thousands of times faster than electronic ones because light travels much faster than electrons.Do you think it could be possible to photonics turn electronics entirely obsolete?

[shane_allen]

Off the cuff, yes. It's possible and seems to be something that will become more of an issue in quantum computing.

Fiber optics seems relevant to this discussion as we use light to pass between great distances, but the issue is computation using photons. Photons can be used as bits through photon polarization, but is it possible to compute with these?

Now I'll go read about it and see how wrong I am.

[SG-1]

I have no references to this, but from my understanding computation is just 1s and 0s. If you can send anything over light (which is possible today) it must be able to condense down to binary, therefore computation is possible.

Apparently there is a conversion between electrons and photons. So you are actually just using light to send packets of data, but to make it meaningful you have to convert it to electrons, and thus you are only using light to transmit data. Which could mean faster internet speeds and read/write.

*From here on I will stop pretending to understand anything and just link directly to what I am reading.
http://en.wikipedia....tical_computing - read the part on logic gates, it is way over my head how they would use photons over electrons

http://www.engadget....on-provide-pat/ - Hey, we already have these fancy things

http://www.technolog...out-of-silicon/ - and it is 10GHz

http://spectrum.ieee...uantum-internet - "We’re doing what people in the Bell Laboratories did in the 1950s,” says Eden Figueroa, one of the physicists involved in the project. ”They were inventing the transistor, and people thought they were crazy. But 50 years later, everyone is using a laptop.” Now, he says, ”we’re inventing the quantum transistor that may be used in computers 30 years from now."

http://www-ee.stanfo...u/~dabm/379.pdf - Says that optical transistors use more energy, but I can't get a number power consumption per transistor

http://nanotechweb.o...cle/tech/39708/ - "Unfortunately, we are still far from seeing photonic circuits in desktop computers and other everyday applications because these circuits require light to be manipulated in nanoscopic spaces, something that is very difficult to do. Moreover, efficient mixing of light beams, which allows energy from one beam to amplify another, usually requires macrosized crystals" Nanotech? What about in the 22nd century? Defiantly.