STANFORD

While wide- and metropolitan-area networks have achieved terabit-per-second capacities, much work remains to further increase capacity and make these networks more flexible and robust. Perhaps the grand challenge of the next decade lies in providing economical access at high speeds (100 Mb/s) to every home, business and classroom. In local-area networks, new approaches are required to scale Ethernet speeds to 10 Gb/s and then 100 Gb/s. At a still smaller scale, optical communications is being used to overcome interconnection bottlenecks in computer backplanes and even at the chip scale.