Prospects for an optical supercomputer

“Computers are now at a midlife crisis,” said Alan Huang of AT&T Bell Laboratories. “Beyond 1 picosecond you begin dealing with optical frequencies anyway. So either you ignore the fact that it's optical frequencies or you make use of that fact. I am a digital computer person; most of the computers I've designed are electronic. Now I'm trying to move computers into a different technology that I believe is superior, which is optics. I want to build the world's fastest computer.” (Just for scale, 1 ps corresponds to a frequency of 1012 hertz, or a wavelength of about 300 micrometers in the far infrared.)