{"id":225562,"date":"2025-11-21T01:28:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T07:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/how-small-can-optical-computers-get-scaling-laws-reveal-new-strategies"},"modified":"2025-11-21T01:28:41","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T07:28:41","slug":"how-small-can-optical-computers-get-scaling-laws-reveal-new-strategies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/how-small-can-optical-computers-get-scaling-laws-reveal-new-strategies","title":{"rendered":"How small can optical computers get? Scaling laws reveal new strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-small-can-optical-computers-get-scaling-laws-reveal-new-strategies.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The research, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-63453-8\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, addresses one of the key challenges to engineering computers that run on light instead of electricity: making those devices small enough to be practical. Just as algorithms on digital computers require time and memory to run, light-based systems also require resources to operate, including sufficient physical space for light waves to propagate, interact and perform analog computation.<\/p>\n<p>Lead authors Francesco Monticone, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Yandong Li, Ph.D. \u201823, postdoctoral researcher, revealed scaling laws for free-space optics and photonic circuits by analyzing how their size must grow as the tasks they perform become more complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The research, published in Nature Communications, addresses one of the key challenges to engineering computers that run on light instead of electricity: making those devices small enough to be practical. Just as algorithms on digital computers require time and memory to run, light-based systems also require resources to operate, including sufficient physical space for light [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,38,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-engineering","category-information-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}