I read an ieee paper a few years ago that went into why photonic computing failed and why it won’t ever succeed.
The problem is that photons are fat compared to electrons so circuits couldn’t be made as small as they are already today. When cmos was 500 nm and researchers weren’t sure if things could be made smaller, photonics made sense. But now they’re at 3nm process (yes it is a marketing label, but pitch is 24 nm ) . Visible light has a wavelength of 400nm. The wave function of a photon would smear across circuits that small.
I read an ieee paper a few years ago that went into why photonic computing failed and why it won’t ever succeed.
The problem is that photons are fat compared to electrons so circuits couldn’t be made as small as they are already today. When cmos was 500 nm and researchers weren’t sure if things could be made smaller, photonics made sense. But now they’re at 3nm process (yes it is a marketing label, but pitch is 24 nm ) . Visible light has a wavelength of 400nm. The wave function of a photon would smear across circuits that small.
Intel presented photonic data bus between chips couple of months ago so I don’t think compute would be useful other than quantum stuff.