Moore's Law was never intended to be a scientific principle. Gordon Moore was an engineer and entrepreneur. He never claimed to be Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.

He saw a pattern, and issued a challenge. The pattern was that, using a photographic process, he could double the number of circuits on a piece of silicon every year and a half of so. This was true in 1965, and it's still true. (That's Intel's main office above, a view taken from Intel's Web site.)

But at the heart of Moore's Law was a challenge to engineers everywhere. Keep it going. Even when we reach the molecular scale, find some new technologies, some new ways of making chips, that will keep it going.

And so it has been. So I predict it will remain. Because there are many ways of getting out of the box the original semiconductor business put itself into. There are other materials besides silicon, and other technologies for forming chips besides photographic etching.

No company on Earth understands this better than the company Moore himself co-founded, Intel.

So it's no surprise that Intel has found a way to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in the silicon world, the transfer between electricity (which moves relatively slowly) and light (whose top speed of 186,000 miles/second is more than a good idea). The first result of this breakthrough is a "silicon modulator" running at 1 GHz, but by the end of the year Intel says the same technology will produce a modulator running at 10 GHz, which is as fast as the best gallium-arsenide modulators. (Editors at The New York Times mistakenly trumpted this as a general chip-making breakthrough.)

The news hits just seven months after Intel bought West Bay Semiconductor, a maker of optical chips. This is the way good mergers work. Give some bright people the resources they need to make a splash faster than they can on their own.