As society's appetite for information continues to grow, so does our need to process this information with increasing speed and versatility. Conventional one-size-fits-all solutions offered by digital electronics can no longer satisfy this need, as Moore's law, interconnection density, and the von Neumann architecture reach their limits. These limitations are already being felt in advanced applications such as cognitive radio, adaptive control, and scientific computing. With its superior speed and reconfigurability, analog photonics can provide some relief to these problems; however,...