Status of optical processing in the telecom environment

Abstract

Optical processing has been the topic of research and study for many years. The prospect of potential control of light with light has long been seen as the means to replace electronic bottlenecks within computing or telecommunications processing equipment. Light travels fast (like electronic signals), fibre has very low attenuation, wavelength is an extra degree of freedom, light can be highly parallel and signals can be made to interact strongly or weakly, and many technologies allow the interaction between the electronic and optical signals. Rapid research progress has, however, been limited in its commercial success; optical processors and optical computers are still far off.