Optical Computing Essay

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ITT Technical Institute | Optical Computing | EN1320 Composition | | Peter L. Day | 8/30/2012 | Instructor: Mr. Harold Eggert | Peter L. Day EN1320 Composition I Unit 6 Research Paper Part 1 Optical Computing Topic: Fiber optics in computer hardware architecture. Research Question: How will implementing fiber optics into computer hardware affect future computer performance? Thesis: I believe that implementing fiber optics into computer hardware architecture will greatly increase speed, allow for superior multitasking, and broaden computer application usage. Essay: Optical computing is a new way of looking at computer hardware in which the science of fiber optics is put into the computer chips that typically would be constructed with electrical copper wiring. Fiber optics is passing signals via light through a “fiber” usually constructed of glass, sometimes other materials such as plastic. Fiber optics are a much faster way of sending data between computer systems in networks; by network cable standards, fiber optics are at least 20 times faster than electrical computing which is what is currently used for computer chips today. With the kind of speed that comes with fiber optics in computer hardware, several applications open up; namely applications requiring large amounts of processing, or parallel processing. Computing has been for the past 60 years electronic copper wiring; much research was done in the 1970s, and then later on in the 1990s into optical computing technology without much progress due to limitations with materials at those periods. In the last 10 years fiber optics cabling has drastically improved as conventional computing speed had caught up with fiber optics, and the translation of light signals into electronic signals was made easier with today’s understanding of technology, and computer hardware

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