If you don’t get the tongue in cheek reference of the title, you probably don’t have children who liked to watch Disney movies. All four of my daughters loved Disney and so, I am forever shaped by the Wonderful World of Disney. In 2007 Disney adapted to the screen a novel called, ‘A Bridge to Terabithia’, in which two adolescents escape… Read More
This week I had the privilege of representing one of my clients at the AIM Photonics road map meetings held at MIT in Cambridge, MA. While this was a closed meeting for AIM members, it’s no secret that AIM Photonics, which stands forAmerican Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics, is working diligently to bring up a viable… Read More
If you’ve followed my last article, The Guiding Light and Other Photonic Soaps, you read my comments about the use of waveguides to “guide the light” in photonic integrated circuits (PICs). This article continues the soap opera theme, this time with the Young and the Restless. My point here is that I am continually struck by the dichotomies… Read More
The move towards 5G networks with demands for decreased latency ( 100 devices/m[SUP]2[/SUP]), and the desire to flexibly configure and integrate mobile, fixed, optical and satellite telecommunications is putting tremendous pressure on the design of next generation telecom equipment. Silicon photonics promises to be the… Read More
The move towards 5G networks with demands for decreased latency ( 100 devices/m[SUP]2[/SUP]), and the desire to flexibly configure and integrate mobile, fixed, optical and satellite telecommunications is putting tremendous pressure on the design of next generation telecom equipment. Silicon photonics promises to be the… Read More
Greater demand for more data exchange within data centers is being driven by mobile computing and the Internet-of-Everything. In 2011, it was estimated that over 1 Zettabytes (ZB) of data was pushed through the internet. That’s 1×10[SUP]21[/SUP] bytes of data. And, that amount has been doubling every 3 years since. Given… Read More
Back in 1983 I was working for Texas Instruments during the beginning of the push to let common electrical engineers develop their own CMOS application specific ICs (ASICs). This would eventually the be the fuel that fed the semiconductor engine to reach over $335 billion in 2015. At that time, I was a young guy and I had a rascally … Read More
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on silicon photonics lately and I’ve come to realize that while there is much written on the development of individual silicon photonic components and devices (modulators, photo detectors, optical amplifiers and such) that much of the cost and therefore chances of economic success… Read More
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel ‘Lord of the Rings’, the Dark Lord Sauron created the “One Ring” as the ultimate weapon to conquer all of Middle-earth. So too it seems that in the world of integrated silicon photonics, the “ring” has become somewhat ubiquitous and powerful. Resonance … Read More
In the 1999 comedy, The Spy Who Shagged Me, Dr. Evil laments about why he can’t have sharks with “laser beams” attached to their heads. I get the feeling that silicon photonic designers sometimes feel the same way about why they don’t yet have integrated on-chip laser light sources. While off-chip light… Read More
