100 billion times a second and counting...

John Markoff reports on a breakthrough in Laser Beam Technology at Stanford. The quantum world never ceases to amaze me...

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26 - A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to modulate, or switch on and off, a beam of laser light up to a 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.

The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear potentially more than 10 times faster than the highest-performance commercial products available today.

The team reported its discovery in the current issue of Nature, which was published on Wednesday. Such an advance could have broad applications both in accelerating the already declining cost of optical networking and in potentially transforming computers in the future by making it possible to interconnect computer chips at extremely high data rates.

Currently, the communications industry uses costly equipment to transmit data over optical fibers at up to 10 billion bits per second. However, researchers are already experimenting with optically linked computers in which components may be located on different sides of the globe. Cheap optical switches will also make it possible to create data superhighways inside computers, making it possible to reorganize them for better performance.

"The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."

The modulator, or solid-state shutter, reported by the team, could also have a dramatic effect on the telecommunications industry, which is already being transformed by the falling cost of optical fiber networks.

The device, which is constructed from silicon and germanium, would alternately block and transmit light from a separate continuous wave laser beam, making it possible to split the beam into a stream of ones and zeros.

The effect, known as a Quantum-Confined Stark Effect, or QCSE, has been previously demonstrated, but was not expected in the germanium, a material that is compatible with the industry's silicon-based manufacturing technologies.

The Stark Effect allows materials to act as shutters for particular wavelengths of light as an electrical field is switched on and off. In the past, however, the effect has been achieved in optoelectronic applications by using exotic materials like gallium Aarsenide, which are not easily compatible with standard chip-making techniques.

"What we achieved is somewhat surprising," said James S. Harris, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor, who is a member of the research group. "No one thought it would work."

The research project was supported both by the Intel Corporation and by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Intel has been intensely interested in the possibility of designing optical communications components with standard chip-making tools, both for networking and computer communications applications. Theodore I. Kamins, a quantum materials specialist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, also contributed to the research effort.

"They've made a big leap," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's Photonics Technology Laboratory. That research group has made a number of announcements about progress in development of similar components that could lead to low-cost optical network systems in the future.

He acknowledged, however, that there is a significant gap between research results and commercial availability of devices based on scientific breakthroughs.

Other designers working in the field were also cautious about direct applications of the technology. Alex Dickenson, chief executive of Luxtera, a Carlsbad, Calif. start-up firm that announced a 10-billion bit per second optical modulator using a different silicon-based approach earlier this year, said that he believed there would significant hurdles to the commercialization of the Stanford discovery.

He cautioned that while the display was interesting from an academic perspective, the researchers had yet to prove that the effect works at the standard frequencies of light used by the telecommunications industry.

Several industry executives said the advance was significant because it meant that optical data networks were now on the same Moore's Law curve of increasing performance and falling cost that has driven the computer industry for the past four decades. In 1965, the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip was doubling at regular intervals. The semiconductor industry has held to that rate of change since then, giving rise to the modern era of microelectronics that has transformed the global economy.

Now that rate of change could be directing the future of the telecommunications industry. Computer and communications industry executives believe that advancements in inexpensive optical networks will transform the computer industry and other major industries ranging from the financial marketplace to Hollywood.

Quantum Dot

Quantum dots have received a good deal of attention in the nano world. It will be interesting to see how Invitrogen's purchase of Quantum Dot evolves in the months ahead...

Analysts are studying last week's acquisition by Invitrogen of Quantum Dot Corp., the nanotech startup that laid claim to all key life-science applications for quantum dots, trying to guess the sale amount and what it might mean for the industry.

Some nanotechnologists consider the sale of the Hayward, Calif., company a success, seeing it as a corporate leader's validation of the company as worthy of investment. Others are not so sure.

"It's nothing of the sort," Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at Lux Research, the nanotechnology analysis firm in New York City, told UPI's Nano World. "Quantum Dot Corporation had a large amount of venture-capital backing behind it, and the acquisition likely did not come close to matching it."

Venture capitalists had invested roughly $45.5 million in Quantum Dot, and although Invitrogen, the biotech giant in Carlsbad, Calif. -- a nearly $3.75 billion market-cap company -- did not reveal how much it spent to acquire the company, given that it acquired Molecular Probes of Eugene, Ore., in 2003 for six times its market valuation, "I would guess that Quantum Dot ... was acquired for $20 to $25 million at best," Nordan said.

Quantum dots are semiconductor crystals only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide. They fluoresce brightly when they absorb even minuscule amounts of light. Scientists can engineer the specific colors of light that quantum dots absorb or emit with extraordinary precision by adjusting their size and makeup. For instance, a cadmium-selenide quantum dot more than 6 nanometers in diameter emits red light, while one less than 3 nanometers wide glows green.

Quantum dots "represent the next generation of imaging," said Invitrogen spokesman Eric Endicott. They could help scientists image the behavior of cells and organs to a level of detail never before seen in the $500 million worldwide market for biological-detection agents.

Conventional fluorescent dyes used in the life sciences to help researchers monitor how cells and organs grow and develop normally lose their ability to emit light within seconds. Quantum dots, on the other hand, last far longer, helping investigators to monitor cells and organs in diseased and healthy conditions on a molecular scale in real time.

Quantum Effects

Here's a cool observation by Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine:

"Just one generation ago the closest thing to an iPod was a Sony Walkman hooked up to an IBM mainframe computer."

Think about it...

MIT launches global nanotech push

Speaking of consilience...

MIT launches global nanotech push
Group to focus on medical and health research

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | October 12, 2005

CAMBRIDGE -- Leaders of 10 research universities from around the world will gather at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today to launch an international collaboration to use nanotechnology tools for global health and medical research.

The collaboration, called GEM4, or Global Enterprise for Micro-Mechanics and Molecular Medicine, represents an ambitious effort to apply global sourcing principles to research at the intersection of engineering and life sciences.

The conference was organized by Subra Suresh, head of MIT's department of materials science and engineering.

MIT's president, Susan Hockfield, said in an interview that the initiative could herald a new model for international research, with far-flung researchers sharing their expertise in person, online, and through teleconferencing.

''GEM4 is a new way of collaborating," Hockfield said. ''I am very interested in cultivating the kinds of activities that bring engineers and life scientists into conversation with one together."

Other nanotechnology research projects have focused heavily on diagnostics and testing the effectiveness of drugs. GEM4, though, will use tools like atomic force microscopes, laser tweezers, and nanoscale plate stretchers -- staples at Suresh's three-year-old Nano-Mechanical Technology Lab at MIT -- to study changes in human cells for research projects on infectious diseases like malaria and sickle cell anemia, cancers of the liver and pancreas, and cardiovascular diseases.

''These are tools that were not available five years ago," said Suresh, who initially used them to examine how stresses affect materials. ''They could help to answer one of the key questions as a disease progresses in the human body:

''What is the connection between the development of the disease and the ability of a cell to change shape, move through the body, and stick to a blood vessel wall?"

GEM4 grew out of Suresh's collaborations over the past two years with the National University of Singapore, which has a strong research program in microbiology, and Institut Pasteur of France, a leader in genetics research.

Others that have signed on are the Harvard School of Public Health, the Max-Planck Institute in Germany, the University of Illinois, Georgia Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Chulabhorn Research Institute in Thailand.

All told, these schools have contributed several million dollars toward the project.

Within the next few years, Suresh said, GEM4 hopes to attract tens of millions of dollars in research grants from US agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, as well as foreign technology research funding sources.

At a kickoff colloquium scheduled for tomorrow, teams focused on nanomechanics, biomedicine, and environmental health will begin identifying specific research projects.

GEM4 also plans to host an international conference on cancer in 2007, probably in Singapore.

''By leveraging global resources, we can take on problems that no one individual scientist or institution or region of the world can address effectively by themselves," said Suresh, who worked with MIT biological engineering professors John Essigmann and Ram Sasisekharan to define the scope of the global collaboration.

Among those set to attend a launch ceremony for GEM4 at MIT today are C. Fong Shih, president of the National University of Singapore; Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois; Judah Folkman, director of surgical research at Children's Hospital in Boston; MIT professor Robert Langer, a leader in biomedical engineering; and Thailand's Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol, a biochemist who is president of Chulabhorn Research Institute.

Hockfield, who in May unveiled an MIT initiative to address the world's growing energy problems, said programs like GEM4 will represent another major thrust of MIT research in the coming years. She likened today's convergence of engineering and the life sciences to the convergence of engineering and physics that transformed the research environment at MIT and other technology-oriented schools 50 years ago.

''A third of our engineering faculty are already doing some kind of work in the life sciences," Hockfield said, noting that the two fields were distinct in the past.

''And the life sciences are evolving very rapidly in directions where . . . the engineering disciplines are being applied in their research."

The Fifth Wave Rolls On

VC activity is picking up again. :)

Venture capitalists are raising more cash this year than they've seen in quite some time. According to a study by the National Venture Capital Association, investments in U.S. venture capital firms jumped 62 percent in the first three quarters of 2005, compared to the same period a year ago. Over that stretch, VCs raised some $17.3 billion, surpassing the total for all of 2004 in just three quarters.

At the current pace, the industry will raise more than $27 billion in 2005. Astonishing, really, considering it raised just $3.8 billion in 2002 as it searched for solid footing in the aftermath of The Great Dark Time. So does this mean we're headed toward another era of me-too investment? Not really, says Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA. "We continue to see discipline on the venture side, with firms keeping close to their original targets despite ample opportunities to raise much more," he said. "We could have easily seen a $50 - 75 billion fundraising year had the venture industry not exercised this prudence and accepted more money than could be invested successfully."

I was walking around Cambridge, Mass during the MIT Emerging Technology conference and came acorss this cool bookstore. Love it! 

Our Exponential Future

Here's an interesting interview with Ray Kurzweil, author of the recently published book "The Singularity is Near." I'm about halfway through the book and have been enjoying it so far. I'm absolutely convinced that most folks on Wall Street have NO idea what the implications of a billionfold increase in the hardware capacity of information technology between now and 2029 implies for the global economy. This is what makes my job as a business consultant and quantum-based technology investor so much fun. :)