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New Material Sets Stage For All-Optical Computing
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times: "Researchers have made a new material that can be used to guide waves of light, a breakthrough that could lead to ultra-fast computing. Georgia Tech scientists are using specially designed organic dyes that can process and redirect light without the need to be converted to electricity first. ... 'For this class of molecules, we can with a high degree of reliability predict where the molecules will have both large optical nonlinearities and low two-photon absorption,' said [Georgia Tech School of Chemistry professor Seth] Marder."
According to the article, using an optical router could lead to transmission speeds as high as 2,000 gigabits per second, five times faster than current technology.
I'd like to benchmark this against graphene. Since optical signals don't have to be converted to electrical first, then (I think) the bottleneck would be the optoelectronics.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
The big issues in designing optical switches is their switching time and minimum switch pulse width. I and my group built what is probably the first all-optical computer in the early '90s. We used Lithium Niobate switches, which limited the machine's clock frequency of 100 MHz. It's hard to find the original article, which is in the Feb. 18 issue of Science Express. Subscription required, unfortunately. In that article the authors say nothing about switching time, or minimum switch pulse. It looks like a good piece of research, but eons away from anything practical.