Photon Transistor: Why compute with light?

In a nut shell, the photonic transistor products, which are expected to replace much of the electronics infrastructure during the 21st century, can be made smaller, faster, and cheaper. They are more reliable, generate less heat, and are not susceptible to interference from outside influences. In comparison to photonics, even the best electronics is slow, because photons are faster than electrons. ...

[Why are] photonic transistors able to manipulate information nearly 100,000 times faster than electronic transistors?

... for an electron to physically move from point A to point B, the energy must circulate around the electron along a curved path, while the whole circulating field structure migrates its way over to B. Because all energy moves at the same speed, the energy in the electron takes longer to get to B simply because it must cover a longer circulating distance than the energy in a photon, which makes a straight shot of it.

How many colors are there?

Visible light is a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, like radio waves only having carrier frequencies in the terahertz (trillion cycles per second) range rather than the megahertz range. The photonic transistor has been shown to have a tuning and filtering resolution finer than that of an AM radio. So, if just the visible portion of the spectrum were to be divided into AM radio-wide-bands there would be over 35 billion separate channels. In a computer, that's like having a bus width of 35 billion rather than the paultry 64 or 128 bit buses that have so greatly increased the speed of today's computers.

How much information can a single beam of light carry?

Each color can, in theory, carry over 200 terabits of information per second. The entire Library of Congress has only about 30 terabits of information in it. Multiply that times the number of colors and it represents a gigantic amount of information carrying capacity. " - more