RECOMMENDATIONS AND GRAND CHALLENGE QUESTIONS

Key Recommendation: The U.S. government and private industry, in combination with academia, need to invent technologies for the next factor-of-100 cost-effective capacity increase in long-haul, metropolitan, and local-area optical networks.

The optics and photonics community needs to inform funding agencies, and information and entertainment providers, about the looming roadblock that will interfere with meeting the growing needs for network capacity and flexibility. There is a need to champion collaborative efforts, including consortia of companies, to find new technology—transmission, amplification, and switching—to carry and route at least another factor-of-100 capacity in information over the next 10 years.

This key recommendation leads directly to the first grand challenge question:

1. How can the U.S. optics and photonics community invent technologies for the next factor-of-100 cost-effective capacity increases in optical networks?

The first recommendation of the chapter states a goal for increased capacity; the next recommendation offers a path to help achieve that goal, especially with respect to very short range communication, such as that required inside a data center.

Key Recommendation: The U.S. government, and specifically the Department of Defense, should strive toward harmonizing optics with silicon-based electronics

Optical connections within and between data centers will be increasingly important in allowing data centers to scale in capacity. The committee believes that strong partnering between users, content providers, and network providers, as well as between businesses, government, and university researchers, is needed for ensuring that the necessary optical technology is generated, which will support continued U.S. leadership in the data center business.

Recommendation: The U.S. government and private industry, in conjunction with academia, should strive to develop technology to have optics take over the role of communicating and interconnecting information, not just at long distances, but at shorter distances as well, such as inside information processing systems, even to the silicon chip itself, thereby allowing substantial reductions in energy consumption in information processing and allowing the performance of information processing machines and systems to continue to scale to keep up with the exploding growth of the use of information in society.

Recommendation: The U.S. government and private industry, in conjunction with academia, need to encourage the exploitation of emerging nanotechnology for the next generation of optics and optoelectronics for the dramatic enhancement of performance (size, energy consumption, speed, integration with electronics) in information communications, storage, and processing.

Recommendation: The optics and photonics community needs to position the United States in broadband to the home and business space. The U.S. government should pursue policies that will enable at least gigabits per second broadband access to the substantial majority of society at a reasonable cost by 2020.

Recommendation: A multi-agency and cross-discipline effort is recommended to identify the opportunities and optical technologies to significantly increase the energy efficiency in communications networks, information processing, and storage. In addition, new ideas for the use of energy-efficient optical approaches to displace current energy-hungry practices—for example, travel—should be identified and supported. Greater focus and support in this area, especially at the fundamental level where companies are less likely to invest and where payoff could be huge, will be important.