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| Spring 2009 Newsletter | El Dorado Ventures website |  |
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By Charles Beeler, EDV General Partner & We have some bad news: optical computers and all-optical networks aren't going to happen anytime soon. All those
well-intentioned stories about computers operating at the speed of light, computers that would free us from Internet delays and relieve us from the tyranny of
slow and hot electronic devices were, alas, overly optimistic.
You see, there's a critical step to building an optical computer or router, called optical regeneration, which nobody
knows how to do. And, after at least two decades of research and well over a billion dollars of venture capital spending on promising projects, no one has solved
the problem.
It now appears that it is not simply a matter of putting top-class engineers to work on this problem. In all likelihood,
it will take the kind of talent and brilliance that wins Nobel Prizes in physics. Such breakthroughs are rare and unpredictable and thus all signs suggest optical
computing is an innovation that will likely have to wait some time to come to fruition.
Some Details
The past two decades have seen a profusion of optical logic that can serve as memories, comparators, or other similar bits of logic that we would need to build an optical computer. Much like traditional silicon logic, this optical logic suffers from signal loss – that is, in the process of doing the operation or computation, some number of dB is lost.
In optics, the loss is substantial – an optical signal can only traverse a few circuits before it must be amplified. We know how to optically amplify a signal – indeed, optical amplification is one of the great innovations of the past 20 years and has tremendously increased the distances over which we can send an optical signal.
Unfortunately, amplifying a signal adds noise. So after a few amplifications, we need to regenerate the signal: we need a device that receives a noisy signal and emits a crisp clean signal. Currently, the only way to build regenerators is to build an optical-electronic-optical (OEO) device: the inbound signal is translated from the optical domain into a digitized sample, the electronic component removes the noise from the digitized sample, and then uses the cleaned-up digitized sample to drive a laser which emits a clean signal in the optical domain. OEO regenerators work just fine, but they slow us down by forcing us to work at the speed of electronics.
There's been no shortage of attempts to create all-optical regenerators. Many approaches have shown some promise in the laboratory. But ultimately, to date, all have failed the transition from promise to product. All the likely and many unlikely approaches have been tried, and none has worked.
So, if we are going to assemble optical circuits into an optical computer, right now and for the foreseeable future, for every handful of circuits we will need a regenerator, and the only regenerators we have require slow electronics. Oops!
Compounding the frustration is that the photonic logic community has recently achieved breakthroughs in photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Until recently, each optical circuit was its own chip (much as we relied on individual transistors in electronic devices in the 1960s). But now we can lay out densely packed optical chips. So we can envision replacing electronic chips with optical chips – but the optical chips won't run any faster because every few circuits, inside the chips, we'll have to do electrical regeneration.
There are similar problems in building all optical networks. There have to be some optical switches in that network to direct the data. And the optical logic in those optical switches has the same problems as optical computers: every few circuits you need OEO regeneration.
Many people had been anticipating a future of all-optical computers connected via all-optical networks: a nirvana of high performance combined with low error rates and lower power consumption and heat dissipation. We're sorry to be bearers of bad news, but you can stop holding your breath waiting for this to happen.
So What's Next?
All the same, one should not lose heart. There are plenty of opportunities to exploit the characteristics of optics in a hybrid electronic-optical world. First, photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have unleashed a tremendous surge in innovation. In 2005, the optical research community wrote a report for the National Science Foundation on research problems they expected to work on and solve over the next five and 10 years. Four years later, some of those research problems are already solved and in products! As a result, the amount of data we can push through an individual fiber is increasing sharply. We're also able to manage that capacity with increasing sophistication. These results are probably only the low-hanging fruit of what PICs have enabled and we're likely to see more innovation in coming years. If your biggest concern is getting lots of bandwidth with low error rates, the future looks very good indeed.
Second, optical logic continues to develop new capabilities. For instance, a few years ago at Harvard, researchers were able to slow and then stop (hold stationary) a pulse of light. The immediately visible opportunities are for better optical memories and to manage data rates inside a device. More opportunities will no doubt appear.
A much more concrete effort is the DARPA-funded Optical Arbitrary Waveform Generation (OAWG) program. OAWG seeks to build radically improved optical transceivers, capable of producing optical pulses that are more coherent and have less noise. These transceivers would allow us to pack more optical channels into a fiber, because we would need smaller gaps between channel frequencies to protect ourselves from cross-channel noise.
The future of optical technology is indeed bright. But we aren't taking the path to the future that many of us imagined or hoped for.
A version of this article appeared recently at queue.acm.org.
EDV Hosts "Survivor"-Themed CEO Summit Surviving the current economic turmoil is no sure thing. To give our
portfolio companies the best chance of making it, El Dorado Ventures
recently held a "Survivor"-themed CEO Summit for its top portfolio
company executives. The tagline of "Survivor: Half Moon Bay" was
"OutSell, OutExecute, OutLast," and the presentations and activities
were all geared to these topics.
Before getting down to serious business, however, attendees squared
off in the annual EDV Golf Tournament, during which Mark Tanoury from
Cooley Godward registered his first ever hole-in-one. Golf was followed
by a tasting of a
variety of premium wines. After dinner, Silicon Valley Bank's Jim
Anderson officially opened the Summit with an overview of the
current economic
situation. Fresh off the latest batch of economic news, the CEO's, El
Dorado staff and invited guests sat down to start the third annual EDV
Poker Tournament. Jim Fowler from Jigsaw was able to
"OutExecute" and "OutLast" the rest of the group to take the win.
It wasn't all fun and games, however. Stanford GSB professor Jeffrey
Pfeffer opened the following morning with
"10 Common CEO Mistakes to Avoid." The CEOs then split up into teams
to develop strategies to outsell, outexecute and outlast, which they
presented to attendees, who then voted on the recommendations and
selected the most actionable ones. We were later joined by outside
experts
for two panels, "Survival of the Fittest: CIO Panel About IT
Spending," and "Survive and Thrive: 2009 Financing Strategies."
In addition, EDV presented its annual Bourne Technology Award at the
CEO Summit to FusionOne for its Mobile Content Portability technology.
The Bourne Technology Award is presented annually by El Dorado
Ventures to recognize companies that have deployed unique technology
with demonstrated customer impact. The award is named for EDV CTO
Steve Bourne, who is internationally known for his work on the UNIX
operating system.
EDV's annual CEO Summit is one of many value-add programs the firm
offers portfolio companies. In addition to the Summit, EDV hosts
regular workshops on timely and critical business issues, as well as
CEO networking dinners and other networking opportunities throughout
the year. It is all part of living up to our motto of being
"Partners with Entrepreneurs."
El Dorado Ventures (EDV) is a leading entrepreneur-focused, early-stage venture capital firm with over two decades of success. Entrepreneurs see EDV as a trusted investment partner who shares their vision and helps them succeed by providing ongoing strategic guidance and access to a wealth of industry contacts. With $750 million in capital under management, the firm invests in disruptive technologies and business models in emerging and high-growth markets, across a broad range of sectors including software, technology-enabled services, communications and emerging technology. El Dorado's early-stage investments have included Compellent Technologies, Cyras Systems, EarthLink, Efficient Networks, Novellus and NuSpeed Internet Systems. Numerous EDV portfolio companies have gone public or been acquired by major technology companies including AT&T, Ciena, Cisco Systems, nVidia, Siemens, Texas Instruments and Yahoo.
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