{"id":547,"date":"2019-04-18T09:32:27","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T17:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nonlinearmaterials.com\/?p=547"},"modified":"2020-09-18T13:15:12","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T21:15:12","slug":"geekwire-nonlinear-materials-goes-public-with-plan-to-commercialize-electro-optic-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/2019\/04\/18\/geekwire-nonlinear-materials-goes-public-with-plan-to-commercialize-electro-optic-devices\/","title":{"rendered":"GeekWire: Nonlinear Materials Goes Public with Plan to Commercialize Electro-Optic Devices"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BY ALAN BOYLE<\/strong> on April 16, 2019 at 1:32 pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"NLM
Members of Nonlinear Materials\u2019 leadership team line up in the lab. From left: Delwin Elder, director of materials development; Bruce Robinson, senior adviser; Paul Nye, chairman and president; Lewis Johnson, chief scientific officer; and Gerard Zytnicki, CEO. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s taken 20 years, but executives at Seattle-based Nonlinear Materials Corp.<\/a> are finally putting the pieces in place for what they say could be a revolution in electro-optical processing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEverything in tech is about timing,\u201d said Nonlinear Materials CEO Gerard Zytnicki<\/a>, a Microsoft veteran who\u2019s served as a consultant for a wide range of tech ventures. \u201cAnd we think that from all perspectives, the timing is right for this technology to basically take off.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NLM\u2019s technology aims to turbocharge chip processing speeds by taking advantage of optical computing, which manipulates photons of light rather than electrons. That, in turn, could open up new frontiers for a field in which progress seems to be slowing down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The classic formulation to describe that progress is Moore\u2019s Law \u2014 the observation that processing speed tends to double over the course of two years or so. That doubling curve is now leveling out, due to the physical constraints of electronic chips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMoore\u2019s Law is not dying, it\u2019s actually dead,\u201d Zytnicki told GeekWire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Nonlinear<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

He and other NLM executives say switching from electrons to photons would change the equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you look at the history of the computer business, it has been driven by big jumps in speed of processors, which enable next generations of applications. Great companies have been created when those big jumps have occurred,\u201d said NLM Chairman and President Paul Nye<\/a>, who has 35 years of experience with technology startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past, great companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have all capitalized on the upside of Moore\u2019s Law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow that Moore\u2019s Law has died, the only option is optics,\u201d Nye argued. \u201cPeople have been waiting for years for optics to make sense. It hasn\u2019t made sense because the materials haven\u2019t been there. But now they are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nye said he expects the computer-chip marketplace to shift rapidly to optics over the next five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve heard that before: Back in 2000, researchers at the University of Washington unveiled an \u201copto-chip\u201d<\/a> that they said could come into wide commercial use within five years. They expected the chip to speed up processing times by more than an order of magnitude, into the range of hundreds of gigahertz (compared with today\u2019s best electronic performance of around 8.8 gigahertz<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers assumed that they\u2019d be able to shrink down the optical circuitry to mesh with electronics and create smoothly working electro-optical hybrid devices. Unfortunately, it didn\u2019t work out that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPerformance improved rapidly over the first few years, and hit a wall around 2007,\u201d said Lewis Johnson<\/a>, NLM\u2019s chief scientific officer and a research scientist at UW\u2019s Department of Chemistry. \u201cIt took a number of years for people to figure out how to integrate even the second-generation materials onto small components on a chip.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now NLM and its research partners at UW and other institutions are seeing the light at the end of the plasmonic tunnel. Over the past couple of years, UW researchers have reported a series<\/a> of advances<\/a> in the development of electro-optic modulators that can transform electronic signals into optical signals with low signal loss. At the same time, the materials used in optical chips have been improving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Electro-optic
This artistic rendering magnifies an electro-optic modulator. (Virginia Commonwealth University Illustration \/ Nathaniel Kinsey)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Working in league with UW\u2019s CoMotion innovation hub<\/a>, researchers like Johnson and electro-optic technology pioneers Larry Dalton<\/a> and Bruce Robinson<\/a> joined forces with tech veterans like Zytnicki and Nye to incorporate Nonlinear Materials last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NLM operated in stealth mode until last month, when it announced an exclusive deal with UW to license key patents<\/a> relating to electro-optical materials. Johnson said advances in materials science have boosted the theoretical capabilities for optical computing well beyond what was predicted a couple of decades ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe material itself is capable of potentially 10 to 15 terahertz,\u201d he said. \u201cIf anything, the biggest limiting factors with speed are the drive electronics, not the optical components.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nye said NLM aims to sell the materials for optical processing to device manufacturers. \u201cWe want to be able to show people how to make devices, and in some cases joint-venture with them going into some of these markets,\u201d he said. Johnson said the model would be similar to the way Microsoft built up a wider software ecosystem, or the way ARM created a hardware ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toward that end, NLM has a pilot fabrication facility on the UW campus and is working on a product development kit, or PDK. The company is about halfway through a $1.25 million seed funding round<\/a>, \u201cmostly with local investors, angels and those kinds of people,\u201d Zytnicki said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though Nye is giving out the standard five-year prediction for commercializing the technology, neither he nor anyone else at NLM expects the rollout to come all at once. Zytnicki said optical computing is more likely to creep slowly into the marketplace<\/a>, perhaps starting with internet trunk networks, network hardware for data centers and electro-optical connections embedded in computer chips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zytnicki said optical computing will eventually find its way into telecommunications, cloud computing and healthcare data processing, as well as military and aerospace applications. But he acknowledged that it\u2019s likely to take significantly more than five years to get to that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what will be the \u201caha moment\u201d for the optical revolution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are all aha moments, right?\u201d Zytnicki said. \u201cOur first aha moment was, \u2018Hey, we signed with the UW.\u2019 The second aha moment was, \u2018Hey, we raised half the money we said we were going to raise.\u2019 \u2026 The next aha moment is going to be, well, obviously, finishing the round, that\u2019s a big one. Then it\u2019ll be our first contract.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Johnson said he and other researchers are preparing for the next set of technical aha moments \u2014 on a time frame that\u2019s much shorter than 20 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all happening at once,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: GeekWire<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s taken 20 years, but executives at Seattle-based Nonlinear Materials Corp. are finally putting the pieces in place for what they say could be a revolution in electro-optical processing. <\/p>\n

Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[6,21,22,5],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-press","tag-electro-optic-materials","tag-geekwire","tag-moores-law","tag-optical-computing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1112,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/1112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nlmphotonics.com\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}