Fiber optics + a different approach to fab

 Two very brief items of interest:

• This article is a nice popular discussion of the history of fiber optics and the remarkable progress it's made for telecommunications.  If you're interested in a more expansive but very accessible take on this, I highly recommend City of Light by Jeff Hecht (not to be confused with Eugene Hecht, author of the famous optics textbook).
• I stumbled upon an interesting effort by Yokogawa, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, to provide an alternative path for semiconductor device prototyping that they call minimal fab.  The idea is, instead of prototyping circuits on 200 mm wafers or larger (the industry standard for large scale production is 200 mm or 300 mm.  Efforts to go up to 450 mm wafers have been shelved for now.), there are times when it makes sense to work on 12.5 mm substrates.  Their setup uses maskless photolithography and is intended to be used without needing a cleanroom.  Admittedly, this limits it strongly in terms of device size to 1970s-era micron scales (presumably this could be pushed to 1-2 micron with a fancier litho tool), and it's designed for single-layer processing (not many-layer alignments with vias).  Still, this could be very useful for startup efforts, and apparently it's so simple that a child could use it.