Moving Towards Optical Computing

In today's world it will not be wrong to say that data is replacing gold in its value. One
who possesses the information holds the key to everything. Countries today play their
diplomatic games on the basis of the information they posses. The introduction of Android
phones is one of the attempts to mine user's information. The new strategy is to give unlimited
and cheap internet to the user so that his system is connected to the web for a longer duration
of time and he creates more information. This information is analysed and used for variety of
purposes. People are hired by various companies to analyse such type of data to get the
shopping pattern, spending pattern and consumer’s preferences.
This entire system of generation and simultaneously transporting humongous magnitude of
information rest heavily on the network which carry them. To keep this system working
effectively there should be no lag in the data carrying network. Optical fiber network is used
for transportation of data. As we all know that the major advantages of optical fiber are high
speed (it transports data at the speed of light) and high bandwidth. But at the receiving end of
the network the processing units are electronic in nature. Therefore the incoming data has to
be converted into its electronic form for further processing. This puts limitations on the high
speed and bandwidth provided by the optical networks. Now the electronic processors cannot
process at the optical speed and bandwidth. Even if they are clocked to do so there is enormous
amount of heat dissipation from the circuits. Since the data is huge and high speed therefore
heat dissipation is also high, which harms the hardware once it crosses a certain threshold. To
overcome this problem the scientists are looking towards all optical processing of the incoming
optical signals. The idea is to develop all optical processors which will eliminate opto-
electronic conversions. This will not only increase the efficiency of entire communication
system but will also prevent the hardware damages which proves very costly. Slowly but
steadily the designing of the optical circuits are being implemented. Links of the research
papers on designing of optical gates are given below:

1)https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/design-and-performance-analysis-of-soa-mzi-
based-reversible-toff/11755608
2)https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818658
3)https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11082-015-0334-8