Wednesday, June 12, 2002, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM | Room: Auditorium B SESSION 16    SPECIAL SESSION: Optics: Lighting the Way to EDA Riches?    Chair: Jaijeet Roychowdhury - Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN    Organizers: Jaijeet Roychowdhury, Joel R Phillips    Optical communication has been a key enabler in the development of the Internet. Now it is being considered for on-chip signalling and communication as well. What implications does optics hold for the future of chip design and of EDA? Have EDA and optical CAD anything in common? Can they benefit each other? We look into these questions in this special session, consisting of two invited lectures and a contributed paper. The first talk is an overview of optical systems and their use in communications. The second focuses on computer-aided design techniques in optical communications. The final presentation describes a fast technique for computing optical fields propagating in free space.      16.1 The Optical Internet and the Drive Towards Multifunctional Hybrid Optoelectronic Integration    Speaker(s): Edward H. Sargent - Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada    Author(s): Edward H. Sargent - Univ. of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada      16.2 Computer Aided Design of Long-Haul Optical Fiber Transmission Systems    Speaker(s): J. F. Maloney - PhotonEx Corp., Maynard, MA    Author(s): J. F. Maloney - PhotonEx Corp., Maynard, MA C. R. Menyuk - Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore, MD      16.3 A Fast Optical Propagation Technique for Modeling Micro-Optical Systems    Speaker(s): Timothy P. Kurzweg - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA    Author(s): Timothy P. Kurzweg - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Steven P. Levitan - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Jose A. Martinez - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Mark Kahrs - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Donald M. Chiarulli - Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA