Congratulations to Intel Fellow Dr. Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, who on October 16th at an award ceremony in Chicago, was named R&D Magazine’s “2008 Scientist of the Year.” The Scientist of the Year Award has been presented for more than 45 years and “calls attention to an individual whose accomplishments rise above the norm.”
As director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, Dr. Paniccia is leading much of the innovation behind silicon-based photonic building blocks for future data communications. His team built the first silicon modulator with bandwidth greater than 1 GHz in 2004, the first continuous wave silicon laser in 2005, and the first electrically pumped hybrid silicon laser in 2006 (with UC Santa Barbara). In 2007 they pushed the modulator performance to be the first to demonstrate 40Gb/s and then demonstrated the first Silicon Germanium detector also operating at 40Gb/s. All these demonstrations have proven that one can build optical devices out of standard silicon and his team is now working to commercialize this technology for use in and around our PC’s and servers. Paniccia joined Intel in 1995 working on developing an optical testing technology for probing transistor timing in microprocessors. The technology he invented still remains the standard in the industry today. His body of work includes over 100 papers and nearly 70 patents. Paniccia earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1988 from the State Univ. of New York at Binghamton and a doctorate in solid state physics from Purdue Univ. in 1994. In 2007 he was promoted to an Intel Fellow for his pioneering work in silicon photonics. To find out more, read this blog from 2007 Listen to podcast with Mario from 2006
Intel also received an award for the 45nm High-k Metal Gate transistor technology.
