whither optical computers !
Its quite common these days to come across talks and papers that talk about "photons replacing electrons" in computation and communication Coming from an ex-nanoelectronics background, and now rooted in a micro-ultrafast-optics {well , I can stretch my field into the nano regime by claiming that my Bragg gratings are in nms... 100s of nms that is :-) } , I obviously cannot be biased towards either of them, you see.. And yet, I must say that optics have a looooong way to catch up ... eventhough terms like nanolasers and nanooptics are freely floating around... to be able to challenge the "conventional" (Oh, well "traditional" may be) electron based (either Si or even III-V) ones will be quite a challenge ... how much ever you talk about improved switching speeds and stuff ... Neways, here's a nice article that I came across... once more, optimistically loyal to the field http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~sth/SA.pdf 7 years have passed ever since that one...