© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC

Materials for Information

and Communication
From vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits and optical
fibers, the dramatic rise in the power of systems that process and
transmit information has depended on advances in materials science

by John S. Mayo

T
his is an age of proliferating con­ was associated with new materials or dation of modern radio and telephony,
nections: among people, among processing methods more sophisticat­ and until the 1950's it was the chief
machines, among silicon chips ed than the last. component of all electronic circuits.
within a machine, among transistors Yet it had crucial limitations. It re­
on a silicon chip. Information is proc­ hus in the late 19th century the quired a lot of power in the form of
essed by networks of chips and com­ T function of electrical systems was heat, because electrons had to be
municated through much vaster net­ to generate and transmit electricity, "boiled" off the cathode; the heat in
works of copper cables and glass fibers and for that simple function only sim­ turn limited its operating life. Com­
by electrons and photons. There are ple materials were needed: iron to sup­ mercial systems generally could incor­
alternatives to such networks: people port magnetic fields in the generators, porate no more than a few hundred
can travel to meet one another face to copper to conduct electricity and glass vacuum tubes without becoming intol­
face, and they can process data them­ to insulate the circuits. At first electric erably unreliable.
selves rather than having computers currents could only be switched on To build circuits of greater com­
do the job for them. But in most cases and off mechanically (as by a tele­ plexity a new device was needed. That
these are poor alternatives compared graph operator). When the triode vac­ device was the transistor, which was
with what it is now possible to accom­ uum tube was invented in 1906, it invented at the Bell Telephone Labo­
plish through electronic and photon­ became possible to control electricity ratories in 1947. It required a million
ic connections. As a result functions electronically. To make vacuum tubes times less power than a vacuum tube
once carried out by people are increas­ engineers had to move beyond iron (because it did not have to be heated),
ingly being carried out by systems of and copper and master the use of was considerably more reliable and
electronic and photonic materials. such materials as tungsten and tho­ was a much faster switch. Those prop­
The steady rise in the functionality, rium, which served as electron-emit­ erties made it the ideal building block
or functional power, of information ting cathodes. of the digital computer, which was de­
and communications systems has de­ The vacuum tube was much faster veloped at about the same time. As
pended on progress in materials sci­ than a mechanical switch. More im­ computers and transistors took hold in
ence. Today's networks of electronic portant, it was the first amplifier. A the 1950's the emphasis in materials
machines and data bases represent a weak signal in the control electrode research, at least in the electronics in­
relatively high level of functionality. (the grid) could control a much larger dustry, shifted to the stuff of which
Before it could be achieved one had flow of electrons from the cathode to transistors are made: semiconductors
first to be able to generate and trans­ the anode; the oscillations of the signal such as germanium and silicon.
mit electrical signals; next one had to were thereby impressed on the larger With transistorized computers the
be able to control the signals, to ampli­ current. In its role as an amplifier the potential for networking electronic
fy and switch them. Each step forward triode vacuum tube became the foun- components to create information­
processing machines had only begun
to be exploited. The information-proc­
INTEGRATED-CIRCUIT CHIPS are at the heart of modern information and commu­
essing capacity of a computer depends
nications systems. The silicon chip in the photograph is a specialize� circuit used in part on the switching speed of its
in AT&T's most advanced telephone-switching system, the SESS. Called a gated-diode transistors. The smaller a transistor is,
switch, it is connected directly to four telephone lines: two incoming lines and two outgo­ the faster it can switch on and off. In
ing ones. Hence it must be able to withstand the high voltages needed to ring telephones the late 1950's the size of transistors
as well as voltage surges generated by lightning strokes. Resistance to high voltages is decreased dramatically with the devel­
achieved by putting the circuit elements on islands of single-crystal silicon embedded in a
opment of integrated circuits: circuits
polycrystalline silicon substrate, and by surrounding each island with a bathtub-shaped
in which transistors, resistors, capaci­
moat of insulating silicon dioxide. On the surface of the chip the moats, which are only
tors and the connections among them
about four micrometers thick, appear as black rectangles. The single-crystal silicon is­
lands inside the moats are a uniform gray, whereas the polycrystalline substrate outside
are fabricated together on a semicon­
the moats is mottled. The large islands that occur in pairs near the bottom and top of the ductor chip. Silicon proved to be the
photograph are gated diodes. The circuit elements are interconnected by gold-colored most broadly useful chip material, and
aluminum conductors. The chip measures about three millimeters by four millimeters. over the past quarter century much

59
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
research has gone into finding ways
of growing silicon crystals that are de­
fect-free and of depositing ever denser
networks of circuit elements on a sin­
gle-crystal chip.
This networking on the microscale
has led to an explosion of information­
processing capacity-not only because
integrated circuits are small and fast
but also because they are cheap. The
low cost of the silicon chip has enabled
it to find application in a wide range of
devices and has made those devices ac­
cessible to a large number of people.
Last year, for instance, an estimated
seven to nine million personal comput­
ers were sold in the U. S. alone; each
one had many times the capacity of
ENIAC, the room-size assembly of vac­
uum tubes that in 1945 was the first
digital electronic computer.
he triumph of the integrated circuit
T has been paralleled by a spread of
networking at a higher level. In the not
very distant past telecommunication
was something that took place only be­
tween two people. Now the owner of a
personal computer can draw informa­
tion from data bases around the coun­
try, and computers communicate di­
rectly with one another without hu-
1 2
HIERARCHY of interconnections in an
information and communications system is
illustrated by the SESS telephone-switch­
ing system. A gated-diode chip is packaged
in a ceramic chip carrier equipped with
gold leads (1). Packaged chips are inter­
connected by printed gold wiring on a hy­
brid integrated circuit (2), which is also
made of ceramic; the insulating properties
of the ceramic help the circuit to withstand
high voltages. The hybrid circuit is about
nine centimeters long by four centimeters
wide and carries eight gated-diode chips on
its bottom surface in addition to the five
visible on the top. Hybrid circuits are in­
terconnected with other components on an
epoxy board that has copper wiring print­
ed on both sides (3). (Some boards have
many layers of wiring.) These photographs
and those on pages 62 and 63 were made at
AT&T Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Ill.
60
man involvement. The information
explosion has triggered a communica­
tions explosion.
The desire to communicate large
amounts of information has spurred
the development of a new technology:
photonics. In a photonic system infor­
mation is carried by pulses of light.
The light source is a semiconductor la­
ser or a light-emitting diode and the
transmission medium is a hair-thin fi­
berguide of silica glass. Light pulses
(and thus information) can be trans­
mitted through an optical fiber at a
rate much higher than the pulse rate of
electrical signals sent through a coaxi­
al cable. The first transatlantic optical
telephone cable, which is scheduled to
begin operating in 1988, will have the
ability to carry nearly 40,000 conver­
sations simultaneously; in contrast, the
latest coaxial cable, which was laid
in the mid-1970's, has a capacity of
10,000 conversations.
Essentially all new long-distance
telephone cables in the u.s. are optical
ones. Glass is also displacing copper at
the local level: optical fiberguides now
account for about a third of the growth
in the "feeder routes" that carry tele­
phone channels from central offices to
clusters of users. Indeed, if it were not
3
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
for fiberguides, which are much small­
er than metal cables, it would some­
times be difficult to increase the num­
ber of local channels, since the utili­
ty ducts under some city streets are
already overcrowded. Light links are
even being employed to connect adja­
cent electronic machines or equipment
frames within a machine. In such ap­
plications they are desirable for their
immunity from electromagnetic inter­
ference as well as for their high pulse
rates and small size.
The progress of photonics has been
remarkably rapid since the invention
of the laser in 1958. In that short time
materials engineers have developed
lasers reliable and durable enough to
operate on the ocean floor-the most
effective lasers have turned out to be
compound semiconductors such as in­
dium gallium arsenide phosphide-and
they have found ways of making glass
so pure and transparent that a light sig­
nal can travel for hundreds of kilome­
ters before it has to be regenerated.
For communications purposes com­
pound semiconductors and ultrapure
glass are to photonics what iron and
copper were to the electrical transmis­
sion systems of a century ago, but the
materials and the processing methods
have grown a good deal more sophisti­
cated since Thomas Edison's era.
Although fiber optics may rapidly
supersede electronics as a communica­
tions technology, so far the substitu­
tion of photonic systems for electronic
information-processing machines has
been much more difficult to achieve.
As yet there is no commercially avail­
able photonic control device equiv­
alent to the vacuum tube or the tran­
sistor, let alone a photonic integrated
circuit or computer. Today if a light
signal is to be amplified-the most
basic form of control-one must first
convert it into an electrical signal with
the help of a photodetector (also made
of a compound semiconductor), then
amplify the electrical signal and final­
ly convert it back into light with a la­
ser. Just as electrical signals could only
be controlled mechanically in the days
before the vacuum tube, so light sig­
nals are controlled electronically in
the systems now available.
In spite of its rapid progress, pho­
tonics is thus still in a rather primitive
state. One of the two main commercial
goals of investigators in the informa­
tion and communications sector is to
increase the functional power of pho­
tonic systems, in effect duplicating
the evolution already undergone by
electronics. The incentives are great:
a photonic computer, for example,
might operate a thousand times faster
than an electronic one. But that is a
long-term goal. The second and more
immediate target is to lower the cost of
the functionality that is already avail­
able, to make both photonic and elec­
tronic systems accessible for a broader
range of applications.
he bulk of the materials and the
T bulk of the costs in a modern infor­
mation or communications system are
accounted for by the simple task of
moving electrons and photons from
one point to another. In other words,
the expense lies not in the components
of the system but in the interconnec­
tions among them. That is true at ev­
ery scale from the individual silicon
chip to the transcontinental telephone
network. It is therefore appropriate to
analyze the cost of a typical system in
terms of the cost per interconnection
at each scale: the cost of the chip or
the network divided by the number of
interconnections it provides. As one
would expect, the longer the intercon­
nection is, the more material is needed
to make it and the more it costs.
The aluminum conductors that link
circuit elements on a silicon chip are
typically only a few micrometers long.
They can be deposited by the millions
in a single "exposure" through a pho­
tomask that defines the wiring pattern.
Although the pattern may be enor­
mously complex, each interconnection
costs only about 10 millionths of a dol­
lar. Connecting the chip to external
wiring, on the other hand, is signif­
icantly more expensive. The chip is
first mounted on a plastic or ceramic
carrier that measures a couple of centi­
meters across and is equipped with a
dozen or more metal leads. The cost
per lead of the cheapest plastic chip
carrier is about one cent, or 1,000
times more than the cost per intercon­
nection on a chip.
Chip carriers are mounted on a
printed wiring board, either directly or
by first affixing them to a ceramic de­
vice called a hybrid integrated circuit.
The cost of a printed wiring board de­
pends on how many layers of wiring
it incorporates. In complex systems a
wiring board usually consists of eight
or so sheets of epoxy-coated fiber­
glass, each with a copper wiring pat­
tern etched onto it. The sheets are
bonded together and connected elec­
trically by copper-plated holes in the
epoxy. Such a multilayer board may
provide a large number of intercon­
necting paths, but it is also physically
large (in many cases about the size
of this page), and so it requires a lot
of materials. Furthermore, it is rather
hard to assemble and to test. From
chip carrier to printed wiring board
the cost per interconnection rises by
another factor of 10, to about 10 cents.
A wiring board that has been filled
with chip carriers (as well as with dis­
crete circuit elements such as resistors
and capacitors) is called a circuit pack.
A video cassette recorder or a personal
computer may contain the equivalent
of a single circuit pack, but to build
a more complex system a number of
circuit packs must be interconnected.
The interconnections are often print­
ed on a large multilayer wiring board
called a backplane, and the circuit
packs are placed upright in a metal
frame and linked to the backplane ei­
ther electrically or optically. The cost
per interconnection at the frame level
is about $1.
Connections between frames are in­
creasingly being made with optical fi­
bers. This is particularly true when the
frames are miles apart in different ma­
chines. The cost of such an intercon­
nection is very high, and it rises with
distance. A single coast-to-coast fiber
link costs millions of dollars-about a
trillion times more than an intercon­
nection on a silicon chip. Few users
have either the need Qr the resources to
maintain a full-time private connec­
tion; it usually makes more sense to
rent part of the national telecommuni­
cations network.
Because interconnection costs are
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
such a large part of the total cost of a
system, hardware designers face two
great pressures. The first pressure is to
push the complexity of silicon chips
to its ultimate limit. The point is not
to maximize the number of circuit el­
ements per se; instead it is to put as
many interconnections as possible on
the chip, where they cost the least. The
second pressure is to push lasers and
fiberguides to their ultimate capacity,
thus cutting the cost of interconnec­
tions that cannot be miniaturized.
ince 1960 the number of circuit ele­
S ments on the most advanced chips
has nearly doubled each year. Memo­
ry chips incorporating more than two
million elements interconnected by
about five million conductors are now
on the market. Less than three decades
ago, before the advent of microelec­
tronics, it would have taken a wireman
10 years to hook up two million dis­
crete circuit elements. A product that
once would have been worth 10 man­
years is now worth a few tens of dol­
lars, and in the long term its value will
fall to just a few dollars.
How far can circuit integration go?
A rough �stimate can be obtained by
dividing the largest practical chip size
by the smallest practical transistor
size. The limit on the transistor is a
physical one. A transistor consists of
three adjacent regions on the chip: the
source, the channel and the drain. A
small voltage applied to a metal gate
above the channel controls the flow of
electrons (or of positive "holes") from
the source to the drain. The three re­
gions are given the desired electrical
properties by doping them with impu­
rity atoms. Based on the number of
impurity atoms required there is a the­
oretical limit to how small the transis­
tor can be: no less than approximately
400 lattice constants on a side. (The
lattice constant measures the size of a
unit cell in a crystal.) In practice the
space occupied by a transistor on a
chip must be about three times that
long. Silicon has a lattice constant of
5.4 X 10-8 centimeter, and so the
smallest practical transistor would be
1,200 X 5.4 X 10-8, or roughly 10-4,
centimeter on a side. Such a transistor
would take up about 10-8 square cen­
timeter on the surface of the chip.
The limit on the size of a chip is an
economic one. Chips are made by slic­
ing a cylinder of single-crystal silicon
into about 50 thin wafers and dividing
each wafer into 100 or so chips. The
silicon inevitably contains microscop­
ic defects, and any chip that ends up
with a defect on its surface will not
function properly and must be dis­
carded. The larger the chip is, the more
likely it is to contain a defect, and
61
so the yield of good chips declines as kilometers per second. In contrast, the ably beyond the capability of silica
their size is increased. At present it best research result achieved so far is glass and may require new fiber mate­
is uneconomical to manufacture chips 20 billion pulses per second, with a rials such as heavy-metal fluorides. As
whose area is more than about one repeater spacing of 68 kilometers-in far as glass fiber is concerned the chief
square centimeter. Eventually the lim­ other words, about 1012 pulse-kilome­ demand is for a less expensive product
it can be expected to rise to about 10 ters per second. Today's leading-edge rather than a better one.
square centimeters. system falls short of the technological Lasers, on the other hand, must be
Of that area, only some 10 percent, limit by a factor of 1,000. It will prob­ improved in at least two ways if the
or one square centimeter, could be ably take a decade to reach the limit limit of current technology is to be
filled with transistors on a typical chip; in the laboratory and two decades to reached. First, they have to generate
the rest would be needed for intercon­ reach it in commercial products. much purer light. Although lasers are
nections and to isolate circuit elements What major improvements will it generally thought of as radiating light
from one another. With each transistor take to get there? Commercially avail­ at a single frequency, in reality the
occupying 10-8 square centimeter, able glass fibers are already about ones in service today emit several
there would be room for 100 million as good as they need to be; the rate closely spaced spectral lines. Because
transistors (or other components) on at which they attenuate light pulses light waves of different frequencies
the chip. According to this calculation, is low enough to accommodate most travel at different speeds, a pulse that
then, the complexity of integrated cir­ telecommunications projects that de­ includes several frequencies tends to
cuits can still be increased by a factor pend on fibers. To be sure, a long-term broaden as it moves down a glass fiber;
of 50 over today's two-million-compo­ goal is to span oceans with repeaterless the phenomenon is called chromatic
nent memory chips before the limit of optical cables, but that goal is prob- dispersion. If such pulses are transmit-
silicon technology is approached.
At the current rate of progress the
limit will be reached in about a decade. 4
The forecast assumes that investiga­
tors will develop new techniques for
etching ever finer features onto a chip;
some of the promising approaches in­
clude the use of electron beams and X
rays rather than visible light to define
the circuit pattern. At the same time
workers will have to make larger chips
economical by achieving a better theo­
retical understanding of the yield-re­
ducing defects in silicon. Theoretical
advances, in conjunction with automa­
tion of chip factories, should lead to a
reduced number of defects.
To move beyond the limits of sil­
icon, investigators will have to turn
to other chip materials and chip de­
signs. An example of the former is
gallium arsenide, which can support
faster if not more complex integrated
circuits. An example of the latter is
the proposed three-dimensional chip,
in which circuit components are ar­ 5
ranged in stacked layers rather than
only on the chip surface.

] ust as one can foresee a limit to cir­

cuit integration on silicon, one can
also calculate a limit to the pulse
capacity attainable with current laser
and fiberguide technology. Many fac­
tors go into the analysis, including the
maximum output power of a laser, the
number of photons necessary to define
a digital pulse unambiguously giv­
en the noise inherent in detectors (the
number stands now at about 100) and
the extent to which fiberguides attenu­
ate and disperse a light pulse. The re­
sult is stated as a product of the pulse
rate and the maximum spacing be­
tween repeaters. (Repeaters are de­
vices that amplify and regenerate a
pulse stream at regular intervals along HIGHER LEVELS OF INTERCONNECTION in the SESS are characteristic of a com­
a fiberguide.) The limit of current plex system. Loaded printed wiring boards, called circuit packs, are slid onto a metal
technology works out to be 1015 pulse- shelf (4) and linked to an epoxy backplane at the rear of the shelf by connectors made of

62
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
 ted at a rapid rate, and if they are not
regenerated along the way by repeat­
ers, they eventually run into one an­
other. The information content of the
pulse stream is thereby lost. Hence
chromatic dispersion limits both the
pulse rate and the repeater spacing.
The solution is a laser that emits only a
single spectral line. Such devices have
been built, and early designs are now
becoming commercially available.
Second, at least some lasers must be
tunable, like radio transmitters; that
is, they must be able to emit pure light
not just at one frequency but at a num­
ber of selectable frequencies. Tunable
lasers would allow a dramatic increase
in fiber capacity, because many lasers
tuned to different frequencies could
transmit independent pulse streams si­
multaneously over the same optical fi-
ber. This strategy, called frequency­
division multiplexing, has long been
adopted to raise the capacity of electri­
cal cables. (Time-division multiplex­
ing, in which low-speed pulse streams
are interleaved to form a single high­
speed stream, is already employed on
both electrical and optical cables.)
More important, with a tunable la­
ser each individual light pulse could
carry more information than it does
now. At present a pulse represents a
single binary digit; a high-power pulse
stands for a 1 and a low-power pulse
(or the absence of a pulse) stands for a
O. If the transmitting laser could be
rapidly tuned to, say, one of 32 slightly
different frequencies, then each pulse
could represent one of the 32 possible
sequences of five binary digits. At a
stroke the information capacity of the
fiber would be quintupled. Lasers ca­
pable of this type of quantized digital
frequency modulation (FM) will re­
quire a new kind of detector at the re­
ceiving end of the fiberguide, one that
detects the frequency of a signal much
as an FM radio receiver does. The ex­
isting light-sensitive diodes and "ava­
lanche" photodetectors measure only
the intensity of a light pulse.
Reaching the limit of current pho­
tonic communications technology will
depend also on progress in electronics,
because a laser can pulse only as fast
as the electronic circuit that drives it.
The fastest silicon integrated circuit
available today triggers about three
billion pulses per second. Semiconduc­
tors made of materials from columns
III and V of the periodic table are ca­
pable of higher pulse rates for the sim-

6 7

a palladium alloy. The circuit packs are interconnected by printed frames are interconnected by optical fibers (the small white cables
copper wiring or loose wiring on the backplane (5). A number of at the center) and by copper wires. A typical 5ESS system (7)
backplanes are stacked in a six-foot-high frame (6), and different comprising roughly 40 frames can switch 26,000 telephone lines.

63
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
pie reason that electrons move faster
in III-V compounds than they do in
silicon. Gallium arsenide is the best­
studied III-V compound. It has disad­
vantages that preclude it from com­
pletely replacing silicon: for example,
it is more subject to defects, which
means that gallium arsenide chips are
generally smaller and their circuits less
complex. Yet wherever ultrafast cir­
cuits are needed, as they are in photon­
ic communication, gallium arsenide is
becoming the material of choice.
n the upcoming photonics revolu­
I tion gallium arsenide and other
compound semiconductors will play a
central role. Lasers, light-emitting di­
odes and photodetectors are all made
of III-V semiconductors; silicon is not
satisfactory because it tends to emit
and absorb heat rather than light. Indi­
um phosphide, gallium aluminum ar­
senide and indium gallium arsenide
phosphide are among the materials
from which photonic devices have al­
ready been fabricated, but they are
only the first of what promises to be a
long series of serviceable compound
materials. With modern crystal-grow­
ing techniques, notably molecular­
beam epitaxy, investigators are not
limited to naturally occurring com­
pounds; they can choose the combina­
tion of elements they want. Moreover,
they can deposit different compounds
in alternating layers no more than a
few atoms thick. The possibilities cre-
ated by this engineering flexibility are
just beginning to be explored.
In particular, molecular-beam epi­
taxy shows great promise for creating
control devices that switch and ampli­
fy photonic signals the way a transistor
switches and amplifies electronic ones.
Photonics today is strictly a commu­
nications technology: signals are gen­
erated and transmitted but not ex­
tensively processed. Yet the potential
information-processing capacity of a
photonic computer far exceeds that of
any electronic computer. Each pho­
tonic "transistor" would be faster than
its electronic counterpart; in addi­
tion, whereas an electronic transistor
can process only one signal at a time,
a photonic switch could conceivably
handle several signals at once, because
several focused laser beams could pass
through the device without interfering
with one another. The challenge is to
develop materials that have the de­
sired optical properties and that are
also manufacturable. So far only early
prototypes exist.
The first application of photonic
control devices will probably come
in existing communications systems
rather than in computing. A glass fi­
berguide can carry many signals si­
multaneously, but in the absence of a
photonic signal-processing system it
is hard to tap. To remove a signal or
add a new one, the entire pulse stream
is usually converted into electronic
pulses, which are then amplified and
regenerated in noise-free form. Next
the individual electronic signals are
unraveled (demultiplexed), those that
have reached their destination are re­
moved and new ones are multiplexed
with the "through" pulses. Finally, the
combined electronic pulse stream is
converted back into photonic pulses
by a laser. The process is technically
ingenious, but the cost of converting
the light pulses into electronic form
and back again is high. A photonic
processing system would reduce the
cost of tapping fiberguides and there­
by make it cheaper for many users to
share one high-capacity fiberguide.
Given such strong commercial in­
centives, progress toward photonic
control is likely to be rapid. For a dec­
ade or so progress can be sustained
with known materials, chiefly the III­
V semiconductors, but altogether new
families of optical materials may
emerge from the crystal-growth lab­
oratories. Once photonic control has
been achieved, a fully photonic com­
munications network will soon follow;
the glass-fiber interconnections are be­
ing laid even now.
y focusing on the raw functional
B power of information and com­
munications systems I have neglected
several areas of research that will have
an important influence on how pleas­
ant and convenient the systems are for
human beings to use. The most ob­
vious example is displays. For all its

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COST OF AN INTERCONNECTION increases with its length. metal conductors on a state-of-the-art silicon chip costs about 10
The chart shows the approximate cost and the main materials millionths of a dollar. In contrast, a single optical fiberguide in
used at five levels of interconnection. For example, each of the the long-distance telephone network may cost millions of dollars.

64
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC
advantages, the cathode-ray tube is
a bulky, power-hungry and fragile de­
vice. Liquid-crystal displays, the main
alternative, are often hard to read, par­
ticularly from certain angles.
solution is to have each liquid-crystal
display element controlled by an indi­
vidual transistor or diode. Such a dis­
play has better contrast and allows a
wider viewing angle, but it costs more.
Another area where progress is sore­
ly needed is in systems for storing in­
formation. Magnetic disks and tapes
have proved to be the best permanent
memory devices, but they have rotat­
ing parts, and so they use a lot of pow­
er and are bulky, slow and noisy. Op­
tical disks, which also have moving
jects-of semiconductors and printed important is its software component.
wiring boards, of copper cables and To reach the highest levels of func­
glass fibers, of floppy disks and cath­ tionality, that is, to build systems that
ode-ray displays-operates in harmony are self-directing and independent of
One with a massless world of data, logic intelligent human beings, is the job not
functions and software. The higher the only of materials scientists but also of
functionality of a system is, the more their partners the software engineers.
400 ,------,
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OW
t3 � 300
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o�
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W z 200
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(Do

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« LL 200,000 100,000
parts, have some of the same draw­
00 i<ll<E---TONS PER YEAR-------�> -E--TONS PER YEAR----7
backs as magnetic disks, although a:(fJ
their capacity is much greater. What
g: 6 100
0..-
the world needs is a permanent-memo­ 8;)�
ry chip: a chip that has the speed and
ease of access of today's random-ac­
1970 1975 1990
cess memories but that does not lose
stored information when the power is GLASS IS DISPLACING COPPER as an interconnection material as photonic commu­
turned off. The new device would have nication links displace electronic ones. The black curve shows the annual production of
to be economically competitive with copper telecommunications cable in the u.s. (in terms of the length of the conductors
floppy disks. Magnetic bubble chips, that make up a cable) projected to 1990. The colored curve shows what the projection
which were once thought to be the would have been without the introduction in the late 1970's of optical fibers and of high­
volume digital transmission. Between 1970 and 1984 the U.S. telecommunications indus­
solution to the permanent-memory
try consumed an average of 200,000 tons of copper per year; between 1984 and 1990
problem, never caught on because the
consumption is expected to drop by half. Cable production will not drop proportionately
cost of disks dropped as fast as the cost
because the remaining cable tends to be narrow-gauge: glass is displacing copper from the
of the bubble chips. top interconnection level down. Nearly all new long-distance cables and many new local
A serious obstacle to the unfettered cables are optical. Glass fibers are also used increasingly within electronic machines.
processing and communication of in­
formation is the lack of adequate bat­
teries. The problem is an old one and
has only been exacerbated by the flow­
ering of electronic and photonic tech­
nology: developments in battery de­ SELF-DIRECTING /
/
sign have simply not kept pace. De­ /
vices such as portable computers and
cellular radios have substantial power
SELF-SUPPORTING
requirements, and a lot of the weight
>­
their owners now carry around is in f­
::J
the form of bulky, inefficient and un­ « OF
UPPER LIMIT
z
reliable batteries. If the goal is to con­ o ELECTRONICS
NETWORKING
i=
nect people to sources of information o
Z
whenever they need it, and not just ::J
LL
when they are near power outlets, then
the development of better batteries
must be a high research priority. ,/
/'
,/

" nterconnect!" would be an appro- GENERATION AND UPPER LIMIT OF

I priate motto for this age of infor­ TRANSMISSION PHOTONICS

mation, which, since connections are

made by materials, is in some sense
also an age of materials science. Mate­
rials science has carried the informa­
tion and communications industry far
and will carry it farther still: to the
point at which photonic systems have
1900 2000
EVOLUTION of electronic and photonic systems has been characterized by a steady
increase in their functionality. The commercial generation and transmission of electrical
signals began in the 19th century. With the invention of the triode vacuum tube in 1906 it
became possible to control (switch and amplify) signals electronically. The invention of
the transistor in 1947 made it feasible to interconnect electronic components in complex

the functional powers of control and
networking that only electronic sys­
tems have today. Yet information it­
self is not material, and materials sci­
ence has its limits. One of the astonish­
ing features of our age is precisely the
extent to which a world of tangible ob-
information-processing networks. Since the late 1950's, when integrated circuits were
developed, the complexity of the networks has risen exponentially. Since the mid-1970's
advances in software have enabled some electronic systems to be self-supporting (capable
of operating unattended); a few can now be characterized as self·directing (capable of
intelligent decision making). Photonic systems have progressed rapidly since the laser
was invented in 1958, but so far there are no commercial devices capable of controlling
photonic signals photonically. Light signals are controlled electronically, much as elec­
tronic signals could only be switched mechanically in the days before the vacuum tube.

65
© 1986 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC