Larry Dalton can see the future, a 21st century dominated by speed-of-light technology where radar warns of auto collisions 20 seconds before they happen, sensor systems detect an impending earthquake, micro-chips dial 911 in cases of emergency, and personal computers function as home command centers.
The technology derives from photonics—translating computer, radar, telephone and data network signals into optical format and sending them through fiber-optic or wireless telecommunications systems. Dalton, a UW chemistry professor (pictured at top with Business Professor Michael Song), is recognized as a world leader in applying this groundbreaking science.
He is also director and lead scientist for the UW’s Center for Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research, one of six new science and technology centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). An $18.3 million grant, received Aug. 1, instantly put the UW at the international forefront in the research, development and implementation of photonics-related technology.
Dalton estimates the NSF award, combined with grants from the private sector and federal agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, the Ballistic Missile Defense Administration and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), could ultimately reach $100 million over the next decade.
“This technology is as fast as you can go. It can be a technical revolution just as electronics produced a revolution in the last half of the 20th century.”
Larry Dalton
“We are entering an age where we have even higher needs for information processing and delivery,” Dalton says from his UW office on the second floor of Bagley Hall. “This technology is as fast as you can go. It can be a technical revolution just as electronics produced a revolution in the last half of the 20th century. Many have speculated that the 21st century will see a paradigm shift. The century of photonics would allow optical computers to go to the speed of light in terms of moving photons rather than electrons.”
Dalton has come full-circle from his first consultant job: transforming equipment in a Palo Alto, Calif., company from vacuum tube technology to semi-conductor technology. Because current hardware applications are based on electronics, Dalton and his teams of researchers, which includes a dozen faculty members and more than 50 graduate and postdoctoral students, must initially traverse on an intermediate stage called opto-electronics.
By combining electronics (basic units of electricity) with photonics (basic units of light), opto-electronics exploits the best of both worlds, developing materials that allow, Dalton says, “electrons and photons talk to each other.”
The NSF award covers a much broader scope than photonics. Dalton, winner of the 1996 Richard C. Tolman Medal from the American Chemical Society and an author of more than 450 scientific publications and journals, will lead a group to develop state-of-the-art electronic processing, including new technology for fiber optics, Internet information transmission and memory chips.
But Dalton had a head start. He already holds the patent on opto-electronic modulators called opto-chips. These organic, microscopic devices are capable of converting electronic signals to light signals in computers, telephones, televisions and radar. The optical format transmits up to 100 gigabits per second (100 billion bits of information), and does so 10 times faster than current methods.
“Take the Internet, for example,” says Dalton, asked to show how the technology best relates to the general public. “Our biggest problem there is the upload and download time. We’ve all sat there for 30 minutes waiting for something to load. That’s because the electrical signal from your computer processor is sent through electrical wires into the power supply of a laser.”
Imagine, he says, using the electronic computer processors sold by Intel, but replacing the coaxial cable with lightweight fiber.
“The electro-optic modulators will allow communication in real-time. That’s the fastest response time you can have.”
Larry Dalton
“We have a chip that is built atop your computer processor,” Dalton continues. “It sends the electrical signal up to a metal line that runs along an optical line. This stuff is like window glass. No energy loss and no absorption. Suddenly you can download hundreds if not thousands of times faster. The electro-optic modulators will allow communication in real-time. That’s the fastest response time you can have.”
From transportation to health, from energy management to crisis management, Dalton says the technology all comes down to sensing opportunities and crises before they happen.
“We have the Internet, and this is the Sensornet,” he says. “Because we can communicate quickly by wireless means to the satellites and to fiber optics, it’s conceivable that we can build buildings and homes with sensor-management systems so that some of the problems that occur in our lives could be monitored.”
Envision having a house where a home computer serves as your command center: running your alarm system, detecting electrical circuitry, operating smoke alarms—even regulating your pet’s doors. Dalton’s plan, which goes even beyond the home, could also include:
The critical components of the NSF funding include not only the development of these kinds of technologies, but transferring them to the marketplace. That also means interacting with venture capitalists to create new corporations.
“We’re committed in our strategic plan with NSF to create two new corporations (in Seattle) within five years, and that’s a very conservative estimate,” says Dalton. His discoveries have already sprouted one company that develops and markets his work, the Bothell firm Lumera (a division of Microvision).
Dalton explains that Lumera uses intellectual property generated at the UW and initially was formed to exploit the telecommunications applications. But due to interest in the technology from the Department of Defense and a contract with the National Reconnaissance Office, the company broadened its focus. The sponsored research agreement between Lumera and the UW is nearly $10 million over four years, helped by a $24 million round of financing Lumera received from Cisco Systems in March.
“Lumera is not the end of the game,” Dalton says. “They have already formed an agreement with a second company generated by the participants of this center. The economic impact on Seattle and on the nation will be felt in many ways: transportation, telecommunications and personal electronics, among them.
“Companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Lucent and Corning are already winning business based on our technology that they wouldn’t have won without it. You will see the same thing with many of the top 30 American corporations as they become participants in our center.”
A case in point: a recent discussion with the National Reconnaissance Office regarding a contract for the delivery of global surveillance systems. “We don’t want to buy many,” Dalton remembers its representatives saying. “But we will buy about 1 million.”
“We want to create a whole new workforce that’s capable of implementing the technology.”
Larry Dalton
Dalton’s eyes widen. “Electro-optic modulators sell for $5,000 to $30,000 each and they want 1 million. You do the math!” he says. “That’s one order. We’re not even talking about IBM or Intel, what they want to buy. This is a massive potential market.”
Dalton projects just what a marketplace may look like between 2012 and 2015, the logical target to allow for roughly a decade of research and development, and another four years for implementation into the marketplace. “That gives us between now and 2010 (for research and development),” he says. “Just like electronics impacted every aspect of our lives, this will impact every aspect.
“We want to create a whole new workforce that’s capable of implementing the technology. Studies show that the U.S. has a crisis in high-tech workforce. It basically comes from overseas. If the INS suddenly allowed no more immigration, there would be no high-tech workforce.”
The center hopes that much of that workforce is created right here at UW.
Dalton’s group’s work will reach beyond chemistry and engineering, calling on the business and law schools to contribute on complicated issues such as intellectual property, technology transfer and entrepreneurship.
Nearly one-third of the NSF award will be funneled back into UW education and outreach, training a new generation of students across a broadly educated spectrum. “There will be a number of educational experiences created whereby students from two important consortiums will study here,” Dalton says. “These include the other major research organizations, as well as the designated minority institutions to which we will partner.”
Other major universities participating in the research include CalTech, the University of Southern California, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona.
The center will provide a Web-based resource for independent learners who can track advances in the technology from the comforts of their own computers. In addition, K-12 teachers and students will be able to tap into a Web site to keep current on the research, discover opportunities to attend workshops and learn about the types of careers to which young students can aspire.
“We develop information technology, we make use of existing information technology and we implement a lot of new technology,” Dalton says. “Web-based interaction and training will get faster and more real-time interactive as we go. Someone in first grade could eventually come in and get some basic knowledge about how electronics and photonics talk to each other. It could be like a Dr. Seuss novel.”
Dalton says he’s received hundreds of e-mails from high school students from all over the country, students who normally might attend Harvard, Yale or Stanford, but who are intrigued about UW thanks to an article in a newspaper or magazine or a visit to Dalton’s student-run Web site http://www.depts.washington.edu/eooptic.
“The number of Web site hits has been incredible, but I’ve learned that students pay more attention to the Web site than anything else,” Dalton says. “As a freshman chemistry teacher, I’ve used class announcements and memos to announce changes in an exam date. But if I didn’t put it on the Web site, inevitably some students would miss the announcement.”
An internationally noted speaker, Dalton also keeps busy on the banquet and seminar circuit. He will kick off the NSF’s Distinguished Lecture Series in September in Washington, D.C., offering the first of eight NSF lectures per year that represent research breakthroughs in America. Earlier this year he was invited to speak before the Select Committee on Science and Technology of the British House of Lords.
While Dalton says that the attention he has received for his past work is gratifying, it is the work that’s yet to come that keeps him continually striving for the next discovery.
“Just as with anyone who has a dream, I went to college to find the areas in life I would be interested in,” he says. “We all started out with widely unconnected disciplines—law, business, engineering, arts and sciences and medicine. Now they are constantly interacting and integrated, and they are doing so more and more every day. Information technology has made the world a much smaller place.”
Larry Dalton joined the UW chemistry department only four years ago—the length of an academic career for a nose-to-the-grindstone undergraduate—and each year he has seen a greater physical and philosophical impact on the school from his work with the Center for Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research.
The recent $18 million award from the National Science Foundation, and the sheer volume of research and researchers that comes with it, has created dramatic new demands for space. In the interim, the center will remain in Dalton’s home building, the Bagley Center, where substantial modernizing of labs has already moved forward.
But Dalton sees even greater impact from the grant on the student body at UW. In addition to funding educational outreach for elementary and high school students and teachers (which could pay off on the UW student body down the road), the award has increased the number of undergraduate inquiries and enhanced graduate student recruitment.
The grant also has created greater opportunities for minority students to participate in this trend-setting research. Specific money is earmarked for students from historically black colleges and universities, women’s colleges and underrepresented groups, such as Hispanics, to study in the UW program and at affiliated universities.
Dalton says that these schools include Norfolk (Va.) State University, Spelman College , California State University-Los Angeles, California State University-Dominguez Hills, the University of Texas-El Paso and several others.
“It’s gratifying to know that some of this money will pay for a lot of kids to go to school that otherwise might not have the money to do so,” says Dalton. “We really have a great opportunity here, to discover and share our findings with people who someday are going to make a difference with what we learn.”