A single piece of email may be subjected to this inefficient and expensive process a dozen times as it zigzags to its journey's conclusion. Last year, Lucent's announcement of the first all-optical router, which uses an array of 256 micromechanical mirrors, was a step in that direction. But even the tiniest mirrors are relatively large and prone to failure when compared with the permanence of circuits etched in silicon. Unfortunately, conceiving such a chip hasn't been easy. Photons don't behave like electrons, which can be shepherded down wires, stopping and starting on command like a well-behaved Boy Scout troop.
Photons are more like hyperactive children.
Switch on the average lightbulb and photons pop into existence spontaneously, race away in all directions, and bounce off the walls before they encounter some dark-colored object, which absorbs them, causing them to vanish as mysteriously as they appeared. After seven years of unprecedented collaboration, engineers and theorists at MIT have produced the first designs for photonic processing chips, although these devices aren't referred to as chips. Instead, they're built on a slightly larger scale out of clusters of atoms arrayed in a regular pattern with spaces between them. Think of a jungle gym, and you have a rough idea of the 3-D structure. One slice of it would be comparable to the microscopic pattern coating the surface of a morpho wing.