Breakthroughs in photonics are outpacing Moore’s Law, according to Rich McGinn, chairman and CEO of Lucent Technologies. First proposed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law predicts that computing power will double every eighteen months. McGinn says optical networks will go from being able to carry about eighty wavelengths today to thousands of wavelengths in only a year or two, translating to capacities of more than a terabyte per second. The internet has totally changed the world’s communications landscape and it has done so with blinding speed, said McGinn in his Internet World keynote. If he’s right about photonics, it’s hardly started.
