Today's computers reach their physical limits when it comes to speed. Semiconductor components usually operate at a maximum usable frequency of a few gigahertz – which corresponds to several billion computing operations per second. As a result, modern systems rely on several chips to divide up the computing tasks because the speed of the individual chips cannot be increased any further. However, if light (photons) were used instead of electricity (electrons) in computer chips, they could be up to 1000 times faster.
