|
The was a article in Scientific American some decades ago about integrated optics, which were chips that would use light to change the state of their "optical transistors".
The beauty of the concept was a switch was no longer in one of two states, i.e. on or off. These optical switches could have several states depending on the optical input applied. This had the potential for far fewer switch cycles to be required to perform a logical operation.
Think power of two vs power of five. So if we have say 16 bits of data on base 2 we end up with about 65,000 states. On base 5 we have 2.3 million more states than our 65k on base 2.
As a result the concept of optical computers seemed very seductive.
I have not been able to find much since on this since. One wonders if it was a technological dead end or became classified.
|