Computing That’s Light Years Ahead

A new year brings new trends: in American sports, soccer looks poised to become the new basketball; in health and lifestyle features, fifty is touted as the new thirty; NYC hipsters have been alerted that Brooklyn is the new Manhattan; and, this year's fashion runways suggest that green is the new black.

In the world of technology, however, similar analogies are less ephemeral, and can come to mark quantum leaps forward in the realm of human progress. Just think: photographs vs. still-life paintings; phones vs. telegraphs; cars vs. horse and buggies; television vs. movie theaters; the computer vs. calculators. . .

What if plastic was about to become the new silicon,

and computing was on the verge of becoming fast and fluid as light?

The development of a viable electro-optic polymer has been in the sights of the fiber optic communications industry for decades, because it has been viewed as holding the key to unleashing waves of inexpensive bandwidth. Billions of dollars have been spent by thousands of researchers at large and small companies alike in this pursuit, all to no avail.

After fifty years of competitive research, a small nanotech company from Wilmington, Delaware, named Third-Order Nanotechnologies, has developed a materials breakthrough that could be suitable for making commercially viable photonic chips—chips that hold the promise to be the "silicon" of a new era in computing. In fact, Third-Order's inexpensive plastic photonic chips have shown the potential to be a thousand times more powerful than silicon chips.

In the same fashion that silicon was the material that shaped the twentieth century, Third-Order's third-generation materials just might mold the twenty-first. The company's patented electro-optic plastics would broadly replace more expensive, lower-performance materials that are currently used in fiber-optic ground, wireless, and satellite communication networks, bringing low-cost universal bandwidth along with it.

With this new all-optical platform, the potential exists for Promethean growth in a myriad of different markets. If the first iteration of the Internet created e-mail and Web pages, and the Megabit Internet gave birth to killer applications such as VoIP and streaming music and video, imagine what Third-Order's Gigabit Internet might be like. A billion instantly available television channels. . . ? Lifelike, super-high definition video conferencing with dozens of people at once. . . ? Photorealistic virtual reality role-playing games experienced with thousands of people from around the world. . . ?

One dramatic application for optical computing that may be crucial for national security purposes is instantaneous, "Where's Waldo?"-style facial recognition. With optical computing, faces of suspected wrongdoers may be distinguished with a higher degree of accuracy and one thousand to one million times faster than silicon. With optical computers the size of sticks of butter able to be inserted into traffic lights and security cameras (replacing rooms filled with dozens of bulky desktops), this nimble security application would be both more rigorous and cost-effective than existing solutions.

Third-Order's CEO, Hal Bennett, is both an inventor and a visionary. He would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you Third-Order's technological breakthrough to bring the Gigbit Internet to the home. In the meantime, we would be happy to provide you with a company media kit as well, and encourage you to visit www.Third-Order.com for more information.