good afternoon thank you very much for
the kind introduction information is
everywhere every day we send emails we
access the Internet we make video calls
we post pictures on Facebook and videos
on YouTube we search for information we
tweet we Instagram every day humanity
collectively creates three billion
gigabytes of data if we were to put all
this data onto blu-ray discs
it would make a stack of discs which
reaches almost to the top of the
stratosphere 60 kilometers above our
heads information has become essential
to our daily lives so much so that that
this information is as essential to us
as light energy heat water and
sanitation we have come to depend on
information so much but not only just on
the availability but on the expectation
that the capabilities of our smartphones
and our computing objects will continue
to improve we live truly in the
information age information at the part
of information is computing technology
computing means many different things to
different people
it means high-performance computing or
supercomputing to the scientist who is
trying to solve large-scale problems
like weather prediction molecular
modeling or the simulation of a nuclear
reaction
it means games consoles or virtual
reality for their young and the young at
heart playing Gran Turismo or or FIFA
for companies its service stations and
data backup it’s the cloud where data is
held and increasingly where work is
being done and perhaps most visibly to
us
is the smartphones in our pockets and
the laptops in our briefcases all this
has been made possible by electronic
technology in 70 years of progress of
scaling down from the macro scale to the
nano scale where devices have dimensions
of just a few billionths of a meter
the first general-purpose computer was
built in 1946 and it was called ENIAC it
weighed 30 tons it occupied 60 cubic
meters of space and it required a
hundred and 50 kilowatts or 150 thousand
watts of power that’s the equivalent of
the power requirements of a small
village it had a hundred thousand
components and it was capable of doing
five thousand operations per second and
at the time this was a revolution it’s a
thousand times faster than
electromechanical computers and it was
capable of doing an artillery trajectory
calculation in just thirty seconds the
same calculation took and still takes a
human over two and a half hours to
complete by hand now fast forward to
today after the invention of the
transistor the integrated circuit the
first Intel microprocessor and decades
of reducing the dimensions of electronic
component technology and today we have
advanced processors which pack 10
billion devices into just 400 cubic
millimeters and are able to do to a
hundred billion calculations per second
now the technology behind ENIAC was
vacuum tubes centimeter scaled
components about as large as my thumb
today’s components are CMOS transistors
which are just a few billionths of a
meter 14 nanometers in dimension the
scale of this reduction is such that
today we have more transistors in a
processor than people in the world there
are incidentally more processors in this
room than there are people and if we
were to scale up a chip so that the
transistor is the size of a house and
one side of the chip starts here
this room then the other side of the
chip would be in New Zealand and with
houses or transistors all the way this
scaling down of dimensions has been a
staggering feat of human engineering
prowess and is surely a modern miracle
however it has not been achieved without
cost even if a single chip costs orders
of magnitude less obviously than than
any AK manufacturing cost is still huge
to draw these systems at extraordinarily
fine lines it needs extremely pure water
ultra filtered air the majority in fact
most of the naturally occurring chemical
elements very finely controlled light
sources and very detailed masks and 300
or over 300 distinct processing steps to
achieve the fabrication of a of a chip
and putting all this together leads to
an environment building and equipment
which is so advanced that it costs many
billions of dollars today to build a
state-of-the-art semiconductor
manufacturing plant an even bigger
challenge which is facing us is the
energy consumption of our information
related activities obviously energy
consumption for mobile units is
extraordinarily important because it
defines how long we can use for example
our smart phone without having to
recharge the battery the recent scandal
of mobile phone units Catching Fire is a
dramatic illustration of just how much
energy smart phones really need and what
happens if the batteries are unstable if
we focus on the data centers which is
where data is held where information is
held then we have typical power
consumption figures of 2000 kilowatts or
2 million watts and if we add all the
data centers together in the world and
calculate how much energy they use in a
year we get to a hundred billion
kilowatt hours in one year which is the
equivalent of the energy produced by 10
nuclear power stations
if we add to this all the access points
which are our smartphones laptops
servers and communication infrastructure
to get to the data centers then we can
double or even triple the energy
consumption and this gives us another 20
or 30 nuclear power stations which in
all then means that we use a significant
part of the nuclear power stations in
the world to supply the energy to our
information related activities luckily
we believe that nanotechnology can come
to the rescue here even though
electronics will stop getting smaller in
just a few years there are other
nanotechnologies which exist and which
are actually better at certain functions
than the electronics but which have been
overlooked in the race for scaling down
already some chips are making the use of
the third dimension of vertical
dimension to stack chips with different
technologies where each layer in the
chip is actually using a technology
which is dedicated and more efficient
at a given function silicon photonics is
one of these technologies and photonics
is good at communication an illustration
of this is that we use optics and
photonics and light all the time to
communicate data to carry large volumes
of data an example is optical fibres
which carry data between continents
between mobile base stations and also
bring high-speed Internet and
high-definition TV into our homes
silicon photonics is the reduction of
scale in the optical or photonic
components which are required to make
these communication infrastructures the
lasers the photo diodes and the fibers
now one of the key issues that we had
initially in our lab to prove that these
silicon photonic systems could work is
proving that we could integrate photonic
devices on top of silicon chips at the
nano scale this is actually not easy
because the materials are
and therefore the atomic structures do
not align but by using a sacrificial
layer between the two we did prove that
it is now possible to tightly integrate
photonic devices on top of working
electronic chips we also proved that
it’s possible to build complete photonic
networks on a single electronic
processor chip to make highly efficient
highly energy efficient communication
between processor cores or even between
this example here shows that we can use
also another property of light which is
that light is built off of several
wavelengths or several colors so each
color can in fact carry different pieces
of information and in this way we can
get to an extraordinary high data
carrying capacity in photonic networks
communicating between processes and we
also proved that if we use this kind of
network between sets of processor cores
it actually gives us a speed-up in the
running of software on the processors
themselves so maybe in the future the
processors in the smart phones in your
pockets will not just work with
electronics but also with light and
photonics now looking to the future we
will always need computers to do number
crunching the initial rationale for
computing was to build machines that
were capable of doing calculations that
a human would just take too long to do
but increasingly today we need computers
to think and react intelligently to draw
insight and inference from large
unstructured sets of partial data
artificial intelligence can do this too
and we already use this kind of
computing to do to detect bank fraud to
carry out surveillance security
surveillance to understand natural
language and predictions humor interests
for example Apple’s Siri Google Voice
Search Microsoft Cortana are all
examples of virtual assistants which
which use artificial intelligence
technology however running such a
complex application on a conventional
processor actually requires huge amounts
of computing power and therefore huge
amounts of energy so we believe that
nanotechnology can also offer
alternatives to this model and provide
ways to achieve a hardware platform
capable of running artificial
intelligence applications for example we
can build artificial electronic neurons
and artificial photonic synapses to
build a complete artificial neural
computation platform which could then
run this kind of artificial intelligence
application with a fraction of the
energy required to run it on
conventional processes and maybe even
less than that of the human brain and
this coupled with miniaturized sensors
which again will be enabled by
nanotechnology will lead to for example
drones and robots which are capable of
intervening in emergency response units
and help save lives in natural or
man-made disasters to predict and avoid
climate change intelligent prosthetics
to eliminate handicap for helping the
elderly to live their lives to the full
and to help agriculture to use just the
right amount of water and fertilizer to
grow their crops so nanotechnology which
has been such powerful force for change
in the information revolution will
continue imperceptibly to transform our
lives in the future thank you [Applause]