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The underlying technology is awesome and neat but I can't see this exceeding whatever required threshold to be useful, compared to modern computers. That's simply because modern computers based on ICs have 40+ years of R&D behind them to make them do what programmers want, really fast.

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An advantage of the silicon photonics (over other on-chip optical technologies) is that we can leverage a lot of the experience that we have with silicon to fabricate these devices. There are still large technological challenges, since we often need to introduce new types of materials, etc, but we're not _totally_ out of luck -- there's useful knowledge that can be carried over.

it's pretty clear what's being built here is outside of what typical fabs can build. You need a research fab with top of line equipment. The article basically says they had to do chip-style architecture to get the optical paths to be stable enough to do reliable computing.

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