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One fundamental limit is the size. Optical Fibre s on an integrated optic chip are ten times wider than the Trace s on an integrated electronics circuit chip. The crystals have the same cross-section as the fibres, but need a length of about 1 mm and so are much larger than a transistor. Therefore signal traveling times will be large. A more practical limit is the crystal. Current crystals need light with 1 GW/cm&2 intensity. And as a typical die (in microelectronics) is about 1 cm&2, and some absorption takes place, this means kilowatts of power consumption, which only allows pulsed operation, but Nanotubes may reduce this in the future. The biggest advantage in the near future is the Synergy with optical Telecommunication . It performs its computation with Photon s or Polariton s as opposed to the more traditional Electron -based computation. Optical computing is a major branch of the study of Photonics and Polaritonics . Electronics computations sometimes involve communications via photonic pathways. Popular devices of this class include FDDI Interface s. In order to send the information via photons, electronic signals are converted via Lasers and the light guided down the Optical Fiber . No true optical computers are Declassified or otherwise known to exist. Some devices that are best classified as Switch es have been tested in the laboratory. Transistor s that are composed entirely of optical components are themselves still very new and experimental. A fully functional computer is composed of many Transistors . The number of them required to constitute a computer is arguable, but probably at least 10 and more often 1,000,000 transistors are required to do general computing tasks. Currently, no true optical computers yet exist. The problems of design seem to stem from eliminating the conversion from photons to electrons and back. This conversion is necessary now because we don't have all-optical versions of all the myriad switching devices required by a computer.
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