Speaking at the international meeting of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers in London on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Michael Faraday on Wednesday night, Ian Ross, president emeritus of AT&T Bell Laboratories implicitly rejected IBM Corp’s chilly comments on the prospects for optical computing, saying that while the prospects for optical computers are more speculative than for switches, by the end of the decade, it is reasonable to assume that 20% of the components in high-performance computers could be photonic; he saw that increasing to 50% by 2010.
