Better gate control results in lower leakage compared to fins, and there are probably also some better thermals associated with this approach due to the surrounding metals. However, the density is crap - stackable nanoribbons are likely the better path.
The rest is just atrocious marketing smoke and mirrors from a zombie company that is essentially dead, but somehow manages to linger on as a shell of its former glory.
And on top of that, you can make almost any material lase. There have been entertaining experiments where folks used yogurt, apple juice, hair dye, and other fun liquids in pumped lasers, exploiting some molecular band transition that was accidentally good enough.
I'm afraid that's not even remotely true. Just two counterexamples:
- MLC flash storage devices use multiple levels to store/retrieve bits [1],
- Lots of control systems are implemented with analog PIDs [2]. A trivial example is a jellybean voltage regulator that computes the adjustments needed to maintain a stable output voltage independent of the load.
That's indeed done all the time in electronics: for example, RF CMOS usually trailing on a node three or four generations behind the bleeding edge.
However, all-optical/photonic computing is just intrinsically so much worse than electronics. On top of the issues that I touched on, there are also other fundamental problems, e.g. distribution of power: photons like to get absorbed by nearby electrons. How do you then supply all the active devices (switches/lasers/etc.) with power while maintaining some semblance of signal integrity and dense integration?
In principle, yes, but:
- lower wavelength light is harder to confine within waveguides (or transmissive optics), and messes up atoms when colliding (think of x-rays),
- finding an efficient source at lower wavelengths is one of the main struggles of the semiconductor industry.
Switching/routing usually requires significant information processing (e.g. decode packet header, match destination address against routing tables, etc.). This necessitates 10k or more gates. All-optical computing can't deliver this level of integration density, nor the performance at reasonable power levels.
Maybe there will be some smart way to pre-encode routing information onto packets to reduce processing requirements, but I doubt that such a network could scale.
In reality, all-optical computing is mostly a terrible idea: fundamentally, it cannot reach the integration density of electronics. It boils down to the elementary differences between Fermions (electrons, neutrons, etc.) and Bosons (photons, etc.). Their intrinsic behavior determines the interaction with matter, i.e. conductive/absorptive properties. As a result, optical wires (waveguides) have to be sized roughly at a wavelength (hundreds of nm), whereas electrical wires can be much smaller (<30nm and below). Suppose you want to build an amplifier: all the claimed speed benefits of this optical device would vanish in the path delay of the feedback loop.
But just like graphene, carbon nanotubes, and other fads, you can publish fancy papers with it.
The rest is just atrocious marketing smoke and mirrors from a zombie company that is essentially dead, but somehow manages to linger on as a shell of its former glory.