In response, companies like IBM, Intel, HP and more have spent billions trying to create an optoelectric chip that would compute electronically, but use light to move information. They haven't had much luck. These researchers in Sydney decided that, instead of changing the chip, they'd change the information.
“For [light-based computers] to become a commercial reality, photonic data on the chip needs to be slowed down so that they can be processed, routed, stored and accessed,” Moriz Merklein, one of the researchers on the team, said in a statement issued by the University of Sydney.
So with this new technology, today's computers would be able to process data in the form of photons, instead of electrons. Data would start as photons traveling at the speed of light, slow to the speed of sound to be read and processed by a computer chip, and changed back into the speed of light. It works by allowing data to enter the computer chip as a photonic pulse of light and interact with another pulse to produce the sound wave that stores the data. Another pulse of light accesses the sound data, and turns it back into light.

More at: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/turning-li...203627463.html