New Optical Switch up to 1000x Faster Than Transistors

A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's leading commercial electronic transistors, research that may one day help lead to a new generation of computers based on light instead of electricity, say scientists in Russia and at IBM. Computers typically represent data as ones and zeroes by switching transistors between one electric st