Another thing being looked at is software that will better utilize the capabilities of present machines. This limitation occurs because most of the commercial software is still written for the 8086 architecture. As for other technologies, most companies are very jealous of their security, and so it is difficult to know what new things are really being looked at. Fiber-optics and light systems would make computers more immune to noise, but light travels at exactly the same speed as electromagnetic pulses on a wire. There might be some benefit from capitalizing on phase velocities to increase the speed of data transfer and processing.
Phase velocities can be much greater than the host carrier wave.
Utilizing this phenomenon would open an entirely new technology that would employ very different devices and ways of transporting and processing data. For more than40 years, electrical engineers and physicists have been working on the technologies of analog and digital optical computing, in which the information is primarily carried by photons rather than by electrons. Optical computing could, in principle, result in much higher computer speeds. Much progress has been achieved, and optical signal processors have been successfully used for applications such as synthetic aperture radars, optical pattern recognition, optical image processing, fingerprint enhancement and optical spectrum analyzers. The early work in optical signal processing and computing was basically analog in nature.