This article may also be giving SUNW a lift on a down day
The Best and The Brightest
By GEORGE ANDERS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 15, 2004; Page R1
Robert Drost has been putting things together in unexpected ways since high school, when he got hold of the confiscated wreckage of drug dealers' planes and reassembled tangled metal shards so he could learn about aircraft design.
Today, Dr. Drost is a top scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc.'s research labs in Menlo Park, Calif. There he helps design future generations of computer chips. Instead of accepting classic elements of chip design, Dr. Drost is challenging one of the most basic assumptions of the semiconductor business: the belief that chips need to be wired together so they can share data.
Dr. Drost and a small team of Sun researchers have developed a wireless approach, in which two chips less than a hair's width apart "ping" data back and forth through the air. Physical connections aren't necessary. It's a daring technique that hasn't yet been proved in mass-produced computers. But early tests of this approach, called proximity communication, are promising enough that Sun says it could bring a tenfold or even 100-fold improvement in computing speed.
This proximity-computing project has emerged as the overall Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal's 2004 Technology Innovation Awards competition. Innovators world-wide were eligible for consideration in a dozen categories, ranging from medical technology to software, security, the environment and transportation.
Judges chose Gold, Silver and Bronze winners overall, as well as a winner in each of the 12 industry categories, along with 25 runners-up or honorable mentions. |
