OT: how far are light based logic gates?

2006-07-09 Thread Peter Philipp
How far in development are CPU's that only use light as their input and have a
series of optical logic gates to do processing?  Alternatively they have 
electric inputs to power laser emitting diodes.  Does something exist yet in
the 21st century?  I'd imagine it would have incredible power savings in 
operation and for cooling purposes.

regards,

-peter

-- 
Here my ticker tape .signature  My name is Peter Philipp  lynx -dump 
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Re: OT: how far are light based logic gates?

2006-07-09 Thread Floor Terra

I don't think it's a real OpenBSD question, but let me try to answer.

As far as I know there are no real (useful) optical processors yet.
A while ago there was an new company who promised the EnLight 256.
An optical processor for highly specialized tasks, but i never heard  
about

the device being used.
Optical logic gates have been created in a research setting, but I  
don't believe

the manufacturing process is useful for large scale production.

The real advantage of optical logic gates are in my opinion not  
calculations.
This is because the gates are too large. But you could use optical  
links for

communications between various components in your computer or even
between various components inside your cpu.

Floor


On Jul 9, 2006, at 1:51 PM, Peter Philipp wrote:

How far in development are CPU's that only use light as their input  
and have a
series of optical logic gates to do processing?  Alternatively they  
have
electric inputs to power laser emitting diodes.  Does something  
exist yet in
the 21st century?  I'd imagine it would have incredible power  
savings in

operation and for cooling purposes.

regards,

-peter

--
Here my ticker tape .signature  My name is Peter Philipp   
lynx -dump http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? 
title=Pufferfisholdid=20768394 | sed -n 131,136p  So long and  
thanks for all the fish!!!