Beyond Moore's law [in photonic technology]

Summary form only given. The computer industry has been proudly riding on the exponential curve based on Moore's law for decades. What Moore did not expect, and perhaps nobody has ever dreamt of is that the photonic technology, especially its application in cable industry, has similar if not more profound impacts on the communication infrastructure and service delivery mechanism. This presentation discusses the evolution of cable infrastructure from the point of view of a Photonic Moore's Law that is based on continuous technology innovation in lightwave, RF, and digital processing. We describe the new exponential curve that represents this evolution, starting from conventional fiber-to-the-serving-area with fiber node segmentation, through DWDM-based secondary ring architecture, LightWire/sup TM/ network with fully-passive coax plant and to the CoraLight/sup TM/ architecture based on digital and distributed processing platform with DWDM deployment to the last thousands feet.