City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

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Bell Labs kept making better lasers, and the group grew once again. By
the spring of 1976, they estimated average room-temperature lifetimes of 5
to 10 years for a batch of 90 diode lasers—after screening out 14 lasers that
died within the first 10 hours. 59 By mid-1977, they had lasers expected to
last a million hours at nominal room temperature. 60 Bell Labs put out a press
release, 61 and the technical press took it as a good sign. 62
The race was not quite over. Other labs doubted the Bell Labs calculations,
but in the end they proved reasonably accurate. The technology still had to
be transferred to manufacturing, and transmitters still required temperature
stabilization, but developers could say they had tamed the gallium aluminum
arsenide laser. They had little time to sigh in relief, because the fiber-optic
technology was racing ahead at breakneck speed and developers were starting
to talk about other kinds of semiconductor lasers.
Like many breakthroughs, it took time for the world to appreciate the
importance of the work that led to the room-temperature semiconductor laser.
When recognition came, it arrived in a big way. In 2000, the Nobel Committee
awarded the physics prize to three men ‘‘for basic work on information
and communication technology.’’ It was a rare tribute to the pioneers of
technologies that have revolutionized our lives. One Laureate was Jack Kilby,
the surviving co-inventor of the integrated circuit. The other two were Kroemer
and Alferov, cited ‘‘for developing semiconductor heterostructures used
in high-speed- and optoelectronics.’’