LASER-POWERED CHIP CAN TRANSMIT THE ENTIRE INTERNET (TWICE) EACH SECOND

A NEW LASER-POWERED CHIP CAN TRANSMIT THE ENTIRE INTERNET (TWICE) EACH SECOND

The chip achieved dizzying speeds by using a single laser and a specialized light-creating device to transmit data over fiber optic cables, material scientists said. The amount of data researchers sent, roughly 1.84 petabytes, far exceeds the roughly 1 petabyte of data transmitted over the entire internet every second
The chip achieved dizzying speeds by using a single laser and a specialized light-creating device to transmit data over fiber optic cables, material scientists said. The amount of data researchers sent, roughly 1.84 petabytes, far exceeds the roughly 1 petabyte of data transmitted over the entire internet every second.

Optical fibre communication is the backbone of the internet. As essential core technologies are approaching their limits of size, speed and energy-efficiency, there is a need for new technologies that offer further scaling of data transmission capacity. Here we show that a single optical frequency-comb source based on a silicon nitride ring resonator supports data capacities in the petabit-per-second regime. We experimentally demonstrate transmission of 1.84 Pbit s–1 over a 37-core, 7.9-km-long fibre using 223 wavelength channels derived from a single microcomb ring resonator producing a stabilized dark-pulse Kerr frequency comb. We also present a theoretical analysis that indicates that a single, chip-scale light source should be able to support 100 Pbit s–1 in massively parallel space-and-wavelength multiplexed data transmission systems. Our findings could mark a shift in the design of future communication systems, targeting device-efficient transmitters and receivers.

Read more about the study here = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-022-01082-z