photonics

Silicon photonics for use in interconnects in multicores, though, is very promising purely from the perspective of bandwidth.

There will be a new operating system, a new type of memory (memristors), and super-fast buses/peripheral interconnects (photonics).

Fiber optic (probably the most widespread application of Photonics research) performance is significantly impacted by real-world factors.

Near-term, look for silicon photonics in your data centers and fiber-optic regional, metro, and long-haul networks.

Or maybe silicon photonics are only cost-effective for parallel fiber optics which are a pretty small fraction of the market.

The only other way to do this is expensive photonics kit to convert light to electricity, then back to light.

It'll be interesting to see the parts that silicon photonics and molecular assembly come to play in meeting the future process nodes.

Demuxing is very important, just that it alone does not lead to practical photonics.

I'm not a photonics engineer but I wonder how much of the total energy is in the visible range.

Propagation speed of course affects latency, which as you point out is already running up against relativistic limits, but the physics of photonics vs.

Silicon photonics is likely to be a huge source of potential improvements.

Or We'll use photonics to analogically compute FFT's to multiply matrixes.

(Whatever you do, do not pay any attention to "rack scale architecture".) When it comes to silicon photonics specifically, Intel has been talking about it for years and still hasn't shipped anything.

>"In fact, at 10 nm tunnel currents should be already a big problem on all sides of the transistors, and not constrained to the gate - channel insulation anymore." That's why I mentioned silicon photonics.

So how does this relate to "light-based computers?" The vision that places like IBM research try to sell is that we will eventually integrate photonics (either monolithically, or flipped in some form) onto our processors and memory chips to enable high-throughput on- and off-chip I/O.

Photonics does not have these limitations, but as you say, is still a very long way off from practical application.