e crystal is constructed, a user could control exactly which fre- quencies go into the crystal and which come out. The shockwave approach could be used to efficiently convert light into a wide range of frequencies useful for communications purposes, offering the potential for faster and cheaper telecom devices. Meanwhile, at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), researchers have for the first time incorporated both a widely tunable laser and an all-optical wavelength converter onto a single chip, creating an inte- grated photonic circuit for transcribing data from one color of light to another. Such a device could prove to be the key to creating an all-optical network. Optical fibers transport information between cities via optical fibers. Each fiber can move numerous colors of light simultaneously, with every color representing a "dedicated" transmission line. As data moves between coasts through Internet nodes, the need exists to switch colors. Information arriving on one fiber as orange photons, for example, may need to continue the next leg of its journey on another fiber as red photons because the channel for orange on that fiber is in use. Switching from one color to another is currently accomplished by converting photons into electrons, making the switch elec- tronically, and then converting the electrons back into photons. The new postage-stamp-size device developed by a research team led by Daniel Blumenthal, a UCSB professor of electrical and computer engineering, is a tunable "photon copier" that eliminates electronics as the middleman. Past attempts at engineering photonic circuits with tunable lasers and wave- length converters have had only limited success, and the two components cur- rently exist on separate chips. Integrating and fabricating these circuits on the same indium phosphide platform could eventually lead to lower equipment costs and the ability to avoid signal degradation that may occur when light is moved between chips. 4.1.1 Faster Fiber A team of Florida Tech research