Moore's law and silicon photonics

It is rare for a trade magazine article to receive so much coverage 50 years after publication. But then it is not often that an observation made in an article becomes a law, a law that explained how electronics would become a transformative industry. 

Chip pioneer Gordon E. Moore’s article appeared in the magazine Electronics in 1965. Dr. Moore was the director of the R&D labs at Fairchild Semiconductor, an early maker of transistors. Moore went on to co-found Intel, then a memory company, and became its second CEO after Robert Noyce. 

Moore’s article was written in the early days of integrated circuits. At the time, silicon wafers were one inch in diameter and integrating 50 components on a chip was deemed a state-of-the-art design. 

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Graphene prototype modulator shown working at 10 Gigabit

• Imec's graphene electro-absorption modulator works at 10 Gigabit-per-second
• The modulator is small and has be shown to be thermally stable
• Much work is required to develop the modulator commercially

Cross-section of the graphene electro-absorption modulator. The imec work was first detailed in a paper at the IEDM conference held in December 2014 in San Francisco. Source: imec

Imec has demonstrated an optical modulator using graphene operating at up to 10 Gigabit. The Belgium nano-electronics centre is exploring graphene - carbon atoms linked in a 2D sheet - as part of its silicon photonics research programme investigating next-generation optical interconnect. Chinese vendor Huawei joined imec's programme late last year.

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