In the near term, though, garnet-on-silicon chips are likely to be used in networking — first in backbone routers, which are physically huge and very power hungry because of the current size of optical switching hardware, and then hopefully at home and in the office (100Gbps home networks!) Then, once the size of MIT’s diode for light is scaled down — it’s currently around 400nm long, some 20 times larger than a transistor — we might begin to see photonic circuits in computers.

via MIT creates diode for light, makes photonic silicon chips possible | ExtremeTech.