Audio Transcript THM

01:21:43 – Ajit Manocha: So the question on Moore’s Law – I think, it’s been in many prints: Is Moore’s Law dead? How much longer is Moore’s Law is going to be there? Now, I’ve been a big believer of Moore’s Law from its inception, because I was at Bell Laboratories and that’s when the semiconductor technology was in infancy stages. Believe it or not, Geoff Taylor was also in Bell Labs same time, he was working in the gallium arsenide region and I was working in the silicon region. We used to say „Gallium arsenide? Come on guys!“ [Laughter] „We are the heroes, we are the kings, we are going to drive this technology.“ We thought silicon would maybe go until 1990, maybe 2000 at the most, but silicon technology, thanks to all the R&D by Bell Labs and IBM and Intel, these companies really did a great job and we kept on driving Moore’s Law beyond people’s expectations.

01:22:40 – In parallel, what Geoff Taylor did, in University of Connecticut lab, his invention on this technology, that absolutely inspired me, when Peter called me two years ago. And I was really not interested, but once he told me more about the technology, what the implications are, I got inspired. Met Geoff Taylor, we compared our notes, we know hundreds of people, common friends.

01:23:07 – So when I look at what Suresh talked about, integrated photonics, one chip has opticals and electrical, everything on the one chip. If that was silicon photonics, you’ve got a silicon chip and optics and then the module. But the silicon chip, the reason I feel that Moore’s Law is really near its end: We did 14 nm technology development two years, three years ago. Now it’s 10 nm, now 7 nm. I know the cost of 14 nm development, it was multibillion dollar investment. Cost of 10 nm is going to be a factor of two more and 7 nm a factor of four or five more. On top of that, the fab, to make those devices costs about 10 billion dollars. I think our technology will work on fourth generation, older fabs, fully depreciated fabs, and can do a lot more.

01:24:08 – So that’s why I believe that the future of silicon is going to be limited, especially for advanced technologies, and that gallium arsenide is going to take over. Things which should have happened 20 years ago are going to happen now. That’s what it was, a generic comment I made at the conference, marketing POET technology there, and people were very impressed. I got so many feedback after that, they want to know about our technology. Our job is to be a cheerleader, my job is to be a cheerleader, a cheerleader for the company, but based upon the facts, based upon things that I believe in and I think we’re getting a lot of traction.