Rapid Report | Wave-Based Computing: Key Engineering Bottlenecks
Wave‑Based Computing (WBC) harnesses wave dynamics to process information directly in the physical domain.
By operating on continuous analog wavefields, primarily optical and related electromagnetic modalities (microwave, RF, terahertz), and in some cases acoustic or phononic platforms, WBC can exploit native massive parallelism and low‑latency propagation. As device concepts, materials, transducers, and chip‑scale integration continue to mature, compact WBC units can be embedded into systems to complement or offload parts of conventional electronic pipelines where throughput, energy, or latency are most constrained.
To identify research challenges and current bottlenecks in wave-based computing, 36 experts from academia, industry, and government met on Feb. 24-25, 2026 for a virtual workshop convened by the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), an organization funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate. The workshop participants considered illustrative use cases and identified six bottleneck areas that must be addressed to realize the potential of WBC in real-world contexts:
- Nonlinearities
- Storage and Memory (Including Compute‑in‑Memory)
- Reconfigurability and Programmability
- Incoherent Waves and Modal Diversity
- Error Correction, Noise, and Precision
- Practical and Fundamental Limits
This ERVA Rapid Report was produced by the event organizers to rapidly present emerging engineering research opportunities. Please download and share with your colleagues. A more comprehensive report that includes deeper discussion points and key research priority topics will be released at a later date.
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