AVS 47th International Symposium
    Manufacturing Science and Technology Monday Sessions
       Session MS-MoA

Invited Paper MS-MoA1
Chips to Power the Peta-bit Network

Monday, October 2, 2000, 2:00 pm, Room 304

Session: Challenges in Semiconductor Manufacturing for the First Decade of the 21st Century
Presenter: D. Eaglesham, Lucent
Correspondent: Click to Email
The net continues to grow at a mind-boggling rate. 1999 was the first year that data traffic exceeded voice. Data traffic in North America continues to double every 6 months. This explosive growth is driven an apparently insatiable demand for bandwidth and continuing improvements in the underlying technology. Electronic switches are rapidly moving up the speed scale from Gb/s to 40 Gb/s, while wavelength multiplexing of these signals drives the capacity of a single fibre up from 10Gb/s, with experimental demonstrations in the multi-Terabit/s range. Bandwidth on a single fibre is likely to top out a little short of a Petabit/s within a few years. The basic technology for data manipulation remains the silicon switch. Transistor scaling has been responsible for much of our ability to move huge chunks of data. I will discuss the level of scaling required in the Pb/day era, and the new transistor structures required to overcome the key technical challenges facing CMOS scaling. I will also discuss the new technologies arising to deliver low-cost highly-integrated networking chips, in particular SiGe BiCMOS technologies. Finally, I will describe an assortment of new technologies including MEMS, and integrated waveguides and modulators, that are starting to change the very core of the network.