Researchers Building Computers That Run on Light

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in England are attempting to build a desktop computer that runs on light rather than electronics. A $1.6 million research project starting in June at the University of Bath is focused on developing attosecond technology, which refers to continuously emitting light pulses that last just a billion-billionth of a second."

No more Van-Eck security risks

[cyberbob2351]

I for one would embrace such a revolution.

Modern photonics, if it works within a computer, will make it impossible to eavesdrop on a computer with a van-eck style of a attack. Granted, van eck phreaking a VGA cable may be doable (barely), and performing similar snoops on a motherboard may seem incredibly difficult even by today's standards, it is within the realm of possibility. Take a look at the field of acoustic cryptanalysis [mit.edu] and its potential.

Now extend that into the electromagnetic spectrum, give yourself a very powerful broadband software defined radio and a good isolated faraday cage, and could it be possible to mount a similar attack electronically?

If photonics take over, we will for once be in a safe-zone of knowing once and for all that no overly powerful overseeing entity will be able to eavesdrop on any kind of electromagnetic emissions, so long as you don't have any light leaks.

In the long term

[HomelessInLaJolla]

In the long term the common consumer and investor must approach this technology cautiously. We must remember the cycle that we went through with electronics. That cycle will be repeated with photonics. First they will create an AND gate, then an OR gate, then higher order functions, then the functions will be arranged on a die to make a processor, then the processors will begin to differentiate and will inherit different functions, then the processors will begin to aggregate and some processors will assimilate others. Eventually the architecture of processors will stabilize and they will begin to accelerate.

Except that, since we've been through the logical darwinian evolution of electronics once already, we should be able to refine most of these steps. Don't be caught upgrading your photonic computer once a year for every 100 MHz (or comparable measure of units) increase in the main processor. Don't be roped into investing in every half-ass component chip maker.

It will be highly enlightening to see how the photonics industry develops after the electronics industry already cut the path once.

Personally I'm waiting to see them develop bidirectional logic gates. Electrons are localized enough that current computer technology relies on logic gates functioning, for the most part, in one direction. There isn't much feedback. With photonics I fully expect to see logical functions whose inputs and results are codependent.

Has anyone studied the possibilities of programming using bidirectional logic?

Attosecond?

[plasmonicfocus]

To be legitimately called attosecond pulse, it must be shorter 100 attoseconds (10^-16 seconds). That would mean that one would need > 10^16 Hz of bandwidth just to obey basic fourier analysis, giving us a center free space wavelength of 30nm. It is pretty hard to call such an electromagnetic wave 'light', seeing as it is so deep into the hard UV, it's almost an x-ray ( 10^16 Hz of bandwidth.

Re:For you folks in the US

[arkhan_jg]

WTF is an Eng?

Someone who lives in England, obviously ;) Seriously though, it comes from Land of the Angles, named after the germanic settlers from Angeln, in what is now Germany. They, along with the saxons were the predominant cultural group* in what became England, prior to 1066; collectively called Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-saxon is now a term often used to refer to the white western world from Britain and it's former colonies; as opposed to Hispanic or Gallic - you may have heard of WASPs...

*This is disputed; some historians/geneticists argue that the people were largely neolithic settlers and celts, while only the elites were supplanted by a few percentage ruling settlers from the continent in succesive invasions by romans, angles & saxons, vikings, normans, etc.

speed of light

[dten]

Might such a computing system display any fun behavior if carried aboard a vessel approaching the speed of light?