Optical Computing

From Blindside

1 What is it
2 Impact & Maturity assessment
3 Information Assurance issues
4 Timescale
5 Examples
6 Comments (attributed)
7 Organisations
8 Documents & research papers
9 Experts (academic, practitioner)

[edit] What is it

An optical computer is a computer that uses photons, rather than electrons, to manipulate, store and transmit data. Photons have fundamentally different physical properties to electrons, and researchers have attempted to make use of these properties to produce computers with performance and/or capabilities greater than those of electronic computers. Optical computer technology is still in the early stages: functional optical computers have been built in the laboratory, but none have progressed past the prototype stage.

Most research projects focus on replacing current computer components with optical equivalents, resulting in an optical digital computer system processing binary data. This approach appears to offer the best short-term prospects for commercial optical computing, since optical components could be integrated into traditional computers to produce an optical/electronic hybrid. Other research projects take a non-traditional approach, attempting to develop entirely new methods of computing that are not physically possible with electronics. (Wikipedia)

[edit] Impact & Maturity assessment

[See definition of levels]

We assign this an Impact Level of 1, as any progress in optical computing will have to show superior value or performance to other computing options before it is adopted. We assign this a Maturity Level of 1, as optical computing does not exist outside the laboratory.

Pace of change: A search performed on 26 September 2007 with the term 'optical computing' returned 2,234 patent results since 1900. Of that number, 95 were from 2007 and a further 145 from 2006, meaning that 11% of all patent activity has occurred in the past 20 months.

[edit] Information Assurance issues

A typical problem with optical computing is that the digital optical devices have practical limits of eight to eleven bits of accuracy in basic operations due to, e.g., intensity fluctuations. [1]

Another claimed advantage of optics is that it can reduce power consumption, but an optical communication system will typically use more power over short distances than an electronic one. This is because the shot noise of an optical communication channel is greater than the thermal noise of an electrical channel which, from information theory, means that we require more signal power to archive the same data capacity. However, over longer distances and at greater data rates the loss in electrical lines is sufficiently large that optical communications will comparatively use a lower amount of power. As communication data rates rise, this distance becomes shorter and so the prospect of using optics in computing systems becomes more practical.

A significant challenge to optical computing is that computation is a nonlinear process in which multiple signals must interact to compute the answer. Light, which is an electromagnetic wave, can only interact with another electromagnetic wave in the presence of electrons in a material and the strength of this interaction is much weaker for electromagnetic wave light than for the electronic signals in a conventional computer. This results in the processing elements for an optical computer requiring high powers and larger dimensions than for a conventional electronic computer using transistors. Wikipedia

[edit] Timescale

While research on Optical computing is now being carried out earnestly since the last 20 years, the advances are limited. Commercial viablility and true impact is expected in the medium term, between 5 to 25 years.