Optical Computing Using Photonic Chips: Current Commercial Barriers
Optical (photonic) computing has long promised a step-change in performance per watt, especially for AI and high-performance computing workloads. By replacing electrons with photons for key mathematical operations—particularly matrix multiplication—photonic chips can theoretically deliver massive parallelism with dramatically lower energy consumption. Yet in 2025, despite impressive lab demonstrations and niche deployments, photonic computing remains far … Read more