The quiet period of silicon photonics

Michael Hochberg discusses his book on silicon photonics and the status of the technology. Hochberg is director of R&D at Coriant's Advanced Technology Group. Previously he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Delaware and at the National University of Singapore. He was also a director at the Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS) foundry, and was a co-founder of silicon photonics start-up, Luxtera.

Part 2: An R&D perspective

If you are going to write a book on silicon photonics, you might as well make it different. That is the goal of Michael Hochberg and co-author Lukas Chrostowski, who have published a book on the topic.

Michael HochbergHochberg says there is no shortage of excellent theoretical textbooks and titles that survey the latest silicon photonics research. Instead, the authors set themselves the goal of creating a design manual to help spur a new generation of designers.

The book aims to provide designers with all the necessary tools and know-how to develop silicon photonics circuits without needing to be specialists in optics.

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Books in 2014 - Part 2

More book recommendations, from Infonetics Research's Andrew Schmitt and ADVA Optical Networking's Ulrich Kohn.

Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for carrier transport networking at Infonetics Research

It has been a bit of a thin year for me. And what I’ve read is a little outside the job. It seems like with all of the new media at hand I make less time for long-form consumption.

My wife is a big rower and I bought The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown for her. But then someone recommended it to me and I started reading it before she could. It is a fantastic underdog story about the University of Washington crew team and their road to the Berlin Olympics. It has lots of colour of what 1920's and 1930's America was like and it does a good job of conveying the subtleties of the sport. The central character has everything in life stacked against him but relies on a bottomless ability to suffer both in and out of the boat to grind his way towards a goal. There is so much vivid detail about the personalities and the races that I am slightly skeptical about whether it was all accurate but a fantastic read nonetheless.

Probably my favourite book of 2014 was Zero to One: Notes on startups, or how to build the future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one to mention it. It is like the anti-business book, blowing up all of the conventional thoughts surrounding start-ups and makes for a refreshing read. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio. I suppose Blake Masters deserves more credit than he has received for canning the thoughts of Peter Thiel in a very readable way.

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Books in 2014 - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking various industry figures to recommend key books they have read this year.

Joe Berthold, vice president, network architecture at Ciena

Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I really enjoyed The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable when I read it several years ago, so when I learned about Antifragile from a friend during a chat at an NSF workshop at the end of 2013 I decided to read it. He warned me that it was tough going at times. I enjoyed it so much I decided to reread The Black Swan and then also read Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets which I had not read. Then I went back and read Antifragile again. Yes, it was tough going at times, but I found it very worthwhile book to read and ponder.

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Books in 2013 - Part 2

Alcatel-Lucent's President of Bell Labs and CTO, Marcus Weldon, on the history and future of Bell Labs, and titles for Christmas; Steve Alexander, CTO of Ciena, on underdogs, connectedness, and deep-sea diving; and Dave Welch, President of Infinera on how people think, and an extraordinary WWII tale: the second part of Books 2013.  

Steve Alexander, CTO of Ciena

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. 

I’ve enjoyed some of Gladwell’s earlier works such as The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success. You often have to read his material with a bit of a skeptic's eye since he usually deals with people and events that are at least a standard deviation or two away from whatever is usually termed “normal.”

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Books in 2013 - Part 1

Gazettabyte is asking various industry figures to highlight books they have read this year and recommend, both work-related and more general titles.

Part 1:

Tiejun J. Xia (TJ), Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Verizon

The work-related title is Optical Fiber Telecommunications, Sixth Edition, by Ivan Kaminow, Tingye Li and Alan E. Willner. This edition, published in 2013, includes almost all the latest development results of optical fibre communications.

My non-work-related book is Fortune: Secrets of Greatness by the editors of Fortune Magazine. While published in 2006, the book still sheds light on the 'secrets' of people with significant accomplishments.

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Classic textbooks and the challenge of ongoing learning

Gazettabyte asked its Facebook followers if there is a textbook they value more than others, and why.

It could be a book from student days or a more recent one, work-related. Also asked were readers' interest and experiences with newer styles of learning - online, and books with interactive elements and accompanying websites. Books here include business and technology titles.

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Best books of 2009?

What are the best telecom, datacom and business practice books you have read this year and why? Please send a comment.

Books I'd highlight this year are:

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