A departure from the chip-shrinking pursuit of Moore's Law is optical computing, which instead aims to accelerate the transfer of information to the speed of light, by replacing electrons with photons. So far, the most likely implementation of optical technology are optical interconnects that would replace the relatively slow copper wires now used to link processor chips to one another. These optical "data pipes" are made from light-emitting indium phosphate and silicon.

A completely light-based computer chip is still a long ways away, but there's reason to hope. Recently, scientists have designed the first transistor for laser beams. The transistor, made of a single dye molecule frozen in suspension to -272 C, can act as a switch to control the power of a laser beam passing through it.