Frank H. Levinson

Chairman and CTO, Finisar Corp.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Keeping pace with Moore's Law.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet.

"Networks today are based on Category 5 twisted-pair wires, a medium that has scaled at a factor of a hundred for more than 15 years. But Category 5 is done. The architecture should now probably go to a pair of single-mode fibers, which is what's been used exclusively between and inside cities for the last 20 years. If we bring it to the desktop, we'll have one medium from there to the world that can scale from one gigabit to at least a terabit per second.

"I picture Moore's Law as the drummer on a slave ship, and all of us are the rowers. Intel is starting to make chips with 90-nanometer geometries. But what happens if things don't scale along with faster processors? If we don't get faster programs, more network bandwidth, bigger hard drives, then the system can't give you the performance you need. If a few stop rowing, our oars crash into others'. If we all row together, magic happens."