As quantum and analog neuromorphic systems move closer to commercialization, new architectures continue to expand the definition of what computing can be.
Nov. 26, 2025 –
As quantum and analog neuromorphic systems move closer to commercialization, new architectures continue to expand the definition of what computing can be.
“Usually, at CEA-Leti, research teams plan five years ahead, but in this case, it’s more like 10 years,” Éléonore Hardy, silicon photonics partnership manager at CEA-Leti, told EE Times Europe at the Silicon Photonics Workshop co-organized by CEA-Leti and Soitec alongside ECOC 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark. “It’s a fascinating endeavor, and some of us researchers need to go beyond simply meeting the industry’s five-year demands and look to the future.”
Such long-horizon thinking aligns with a broader shift underway in computing. As EE Times highlighted in this year’s Silicon 100, unconventional computing—once a niche academic territory—is emerging as a category of real technological potential. It has come to describe systems that depart from electronic, transistor-based architectures and instead use physical, chemical, biological, or thermodynamic mechanisms for computation. Examples range from reversible computing, which recycles energy and reduces heat dissipation by making computational steps reversible, to molecular computing, which uses DNA, and thermodynamic approaches, which rely on entropy-driven behavior.
The Silicon Photonics Workshop focused on advanced silicon photonics for the AI connectivity era, and Hardy’s keynote touched on the next frontier: neuromorphic photonic computing.
A brief slide on “photonic neurons,” shown almost in passing during the keynote, caught EE Times Europe’s attention. In a subsequent conversation, Hardy explained how long-standing expectations about photonics are resurfacing as electronic architectures approach hard limits. “Twenty-five years ago, as I was studying photonics, I remember my professors telling me that the future of computing lay in photonics,” she said. “Photons. No latency. … That’s what we need for the future.”
Hardy recalled believing this deeply yet acknowledging that electrons “do the job well,” as she put it. “As long as there isn’t an insurmountable physical wall, [conventional electronics] will continue, and electronics engineers will continue to push the limits to the maximum.”