Illustration by Eric Hanson

For decades, researchers developing electronics have had enormous success advancing almost any application that has to do with information processing: following Moore's Law, data density on an electronic chip has doubled every 18 months. Although this exponential growth is likely to continue for a while, inherent physical limitations are expected to prevent it from lasting indefinitely. Some of these limitations are already evident: as electronics in computers are forced to operate at ever higher frequencies, power dissipation and consequent hardware heating are becoming a very serious problem. In nodes of optical telecommunications networks, where data needs to be processed electronically at especially high operational frequencies, the problem is even more significant.

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