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Fantastic work. Some off-hand questions, total noob in your field but interested in it and reading a lot:

- how fast is it (4KHz mentioned seems a bit slow, or is that a function of size?)?

- how far away from practical applications do you think you are?

- is the optical circuitry limited by the interaction with the electronic parts?

- the paper is already two years old, have there been interesting developments since then (in your lab, or elsewhere)?

The concept of speed that we use in a digital computer does not automatically applies to our optical circuit once we don't work using cycles of a clock. It's not a digital computer, but an operator that realizes a linear operation on an input. The speed of this operation is only bounded by the speed of the light propagating though the circuit.

We have optical chips in operation everywhere for decades, that's not something new. An programmable optical chip has been demonstrated by different research groups, and, for some limited applications, I do believe that we will have it in the marked in 7 to 10 years.

We are also working on different topologies besides the one mentioned in the paper.

Thank you!

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