For 50 years we have seen a continual progression of smaller and more powerful electronic devices. Till today it seems everything you touch includes some sort of electronic device. It seems likely that may be changing. There is considerable research going on into photonics. Essentially replacing electrons with photons as the mechanism for all these activities. It seems that chips designed around photonics would use less energy and carry more data and work directly with fiber optic comminications networks. The trick is how to interface these photonic devices with electronic devices for the things that photonics are not able to do. Researchers at Cornell may have developed the first part of an answer. They have developed a silicon based device that can use an electronic signal to create a photonic signal. We are talking about nanostructures here. So check it out.