Could you foresee fully photonic hardware at some point so not just silicon but motherboards, graphics cards and even external interconnects?
Is it possible to build RAM and SSDs in optical circuits yet? I ask because this has very interesting military uses that could push this forward if you could have devices impervious to electro-magnetic pulses.
I would think some of the first fully optical photonic devices would be network routers/switches. Stock traders have a lot to gain by shaving off microseconds. Possibly a fully photonic router could have a huge performance increase in the volume of packets per second and throughput as well?
I don't see photonics doing the data processing anytime soon. For that our current electronics works just fine.
What we do with photonics is to improve areas where the electronics is not efficient.
Case and point: interconnections. If you want to move data from point A to point B (being A and B either two different chips in your board our two datacenters), we can do it using electric signals, it works just fine, but at some cost. Electric signals dissipate power when they travel through a conductor, no matter how good the conductor is.
If instead we use optical signals instead of electrical, we have advantage in a number of points, specially power efficiency.
Is it possible to build RAM and SSDs in optical circuits yet? I ask because this has very interesting military uses that could push this forward if you could have devices impervious to electro-magnetic pulses.