Much of the pioneering research taking place Intel Corp. now is in the area of silicon photonics. As director the Photonics Technology Lab, Dr. Mario J. Paniccia is leading much of the innovation behind silicon-based photonic building blocks for future data communications. His team has many “firsts” including 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 40 Gb/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.
Cameron Piron, 2008 R&D Magazine Innovator of the Year
Founder, President and Chairman of the Board, Sentinelle Medical Inc.
Cameron Piron’s work emerges from his time as a graduate student at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Univ. of Toronto, as well as from the systems design engineering program at the Univ. of Waterloo. His research has resulted in an extensive patent portfolio, with two patents granted, 19 pending and 10 provisional patents. These innovations led to the formation of a successful medical devices company, Sentinelle Medical Inc., which has grown tremendously in the last two years largely on the basis of the Vanguard technology, a magnetic resonance imaging system specialized for breast cancer detection. He developed new radio frequency coils to provide a signal-to-noise ratio 2 to 4 times greater than other technologies. Now, Piron is working on high-channel count systems that reduce the amount of time it takes to do a breast magnetic resonance scan from two hours to as little as 10 minutes.
