As society has struggled to meet the endless demand for more-and-more bandwidth, a vast infrastructure of fiber optic cables between integrated circuits and across networks has been put in place. Two-wire copper backhaul, and Ethernet networks, etc., have been partially replaced with fiber optic cable resulting in increased transmission rates along with processing power. We are rapidly approaching a physical limit of what the existing infrastructure can support. This is due to copper circuitry that has miniaturized to accommodate fewer electrons. It is not possible for a transistor to switch less than one electron and currently we are at four. Many believe that it will not be possible to improve upon this for various technical issues. The realization that we may have reached the final iteration of Moore's Law has ignited interest in the field of Silicon Photonics.

The situation is very much analogous to an Interstate highway system that has failed to keep up with increasing efficiency of the vehicles traveling on it. Automobiles have evolved from 22 horsepower Model T's into high power cruising machines in less than one hundred years, while infrastructure growth and efficiency has not similarly evolved. The bottlenecks in the macadam of on-and-off ramps are not much different than the traffic jams that impede the flow of digital information. The situation must be dealt with before society can realize the benefits of the next leg of productivity. The story here goes beyond mere capacity as both new highways and new vehicles are required.

It is becoming increasingly likely that in the future, photons will inherit the primary role as the vehicles of digital information sharing, and ultimately replacing the task that the electron has fulfilled since Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958.

Photons have no mass and do not need copper circuits because they possess no electrical charge therefore alleviating many of the problems of electrical interference that has been the major hurdle that modern electronics has had to overcome. While it is likely that conventional inorganic materials and technologies like gallium arsenide and lithium niobate may never be totally replaced, organic materials are uniquely suited to similar applications as they combine the material properties of plastic-low cost and manufacturing flexibility with large optical effects and extremely fast nonlinear response rates. The main challenge for organic materials has historically been thermal stability.