What is actually Photonic computer?
An optical computer (also called a photonic computer) is a device that uses the photons in visible light or infrared ( IR ) beams,rather than electric current, to perform digital computations. An electric current flows at only about 10 percent of the speed of light. This limits the rate at which data can be exchanged over long distances, and is one of the factors that led to the evolution of optical fiber . By applying some of the advantages of visible and/or IR networks at the device and component scale, a computer might someday be developed that can perform operations 10 or more times faster than a conventional electronic computer.
Optical or photonic computing uses photons produced by lasers or diodes for computation. For decades, photons have promised to allow a higher bandwidth than the electrons used in conventional computers. Most research projects focus on replacing current computer components with optical equivalents, resulting in an optical digital computer system processing binary data. This approach appears to offer the best short-term prospects for commercial optical computing, since optical components could be integrated into traditional computers to produce an optical-electronic hybrid. However, optoelectronic devices lose 30% of their energy converting electronic energy into photons and back; this conversion also slows the transmission of messages. All-optical computers eliminate the need for optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions. Application-specific devices, such as optical correlators, have been designed to use the principles of optical computing. Such devices can be used for detecting and tracking objects, for example and classification of serial time-domain optical data, for example.
Some engineers think optical computing will someday be common, but most agree that transitions will occur in specialized areas one at a time. Some optical integrated circuits have been designed and manufactured. (At least one complete, although rather large, computer has been built using optical circuits.) Three-dimensional, full-motion video can be transmitted along a bundle of fibers by breaking the image into voxels. Some optical devices can be controlled by electronic currents, even though the impulses carrying the data are visible light or IR
Optical technology has made its most significant inroads in digital communications, where fiber optic data transmission has become commonplace. The ultimate goal is the so-called photonic network , which uses visible andIR energy exclusively between each source and destination. Optical technology is employed in CD-ROM drives and their relatives, laser printers, and most photocopiers and scanners. However, none of these devices are fully optical; all rely to some extent on conventional electronic circuits and components.
INTRODUCTION TO PHOTONIC TECHNOLOGY
Initialized as an enhanced amplifier no one could predict the extent to which the electronic transistor would revolutionize the technology. It yielded the micro electronics that paved the way for the luxuries of life we employ in our every day life with concurrent development and modifications periodically. Concurrently laser was discovered and later it revolutionized the music, printing and industrial application beyond the scope of practically possibilities domain of human mind. Right now we have achieved a mile stone in photonics , whose revolution is yet to be observed , photon for sure would be proving its worth by virtue of its inherit potentials and would be breaching all the current technological barriers currently electronic industry is bounded within. Photon is expected to replace electron as an alternate with ability to yield relatively exponentially huge data with far more liability, speed and cost effectiveness. Photonic computing is considered to be turning point of technology same was as electronic was considered in twentieth century. It is wrong to claim photonics as emerging field because it has lot of products readily available in market. It was the primary target of the stakeholder of the computation industry to deliver the data fastly because of increasingly dependency of all aspects of human life activities based on computers. Many approaches were adopted in order to achieve the targeted goals though it succeeded to a great extent but eventually as due to a certain electron potential barrier their was a limit set over it. Moreover any further enhancement was proving to be exponentially expensive though even if the change or so called increase in efficiency is very little. All these circumstances began to threaten the future of electronic industry and the quest to get an alternate for the drowning electronic industry initiated. Electrons may be very fast for present computations but what about the future when linguistic time would start with artificial intelligence, auto detection would not be a distinguish or an extraordinary activity rather would be a basic and often used activity. How will the present electronic based computation devices would be able to tackle such heavy processing a wonder of intelligent machines we dream of. Simply the answer is yes we will achieve our targets.
Misconceptions, challenges and prospects
A claimed advantage of optics is that it can reduce power consumption, but an optical communication system typically uses more power over short distances than an electronic one. This is because the shot noise of an optical communication channel is greater than the thermal noise of an electrical channel which, from information theory, means that more signal power is required to achieve the same data capacity. However, over longer distances and at greater data rates, the loss in electrical lines is larger than that of optical communications. As communication data rates rise, this distance becomes shorter and so the prospect of using optics in computing systems becomes more practical.
A significant challenge to optical computing is that computation is a nonlinear process in which multiple signals must interact. Light, which is an electromagnetic wave, can only interact with another electromagnetic wave in the presence of electrons in a material, and the strength of this interaction is much weaker for electromagnetic waves, such as light, than for the electronic signals in a conventional computer. This may result in the processing elements for an optical computer requiring more power and larger dimensions than those for a conventional electronic computer using transistors.
Lets see what will happen in the future the Photonic computing promises an tremendous advancement in the computer technology and our scientists are working on it to make it happen. Everyone knows what today's computer are able to do in the past centuries we thought this is science fiction and is not possible but Yesterdays fiction became today's reality. We will be able to see photonic computers in next 100yrs....
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