Professor David Miller joins Professor Russ Altman on The Future of Everything podcast. David's research interests include the use of optics in switching, interconnection, communications, computing, and sensing systems, physics and applications of quantum well optics and optoelectronics, and fundamental features and limits for optics and nanophotonics in communications and information processing. 

In this podcast he explains the remarkable potential of using light instead of electricity in computation.

"A silicon chip these days looks like six Manhattan grids stacked atop one another," Miller says of the challenge facing today's technology. Photonics holds the promise of more powerful computing by beaming tiny packets of photons through light-bearing conduits that carry 100,000 times more data than today's comparable wires, and it can do it using far less energy, too.

Before that day can arrive, however, Miller says photonic components need to become much smaller and less expensive to compete with the sheer scale advantages silicon enjoys, and that will require investment. But, for once, a way forward is there for the asking, as Miller tells bioengineer Russ Altman, host of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.