A group of researchers from the Technical University of Danes and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have achieved speeds of more than 1 petabit per second using only a single laser.
It takes 1 petabit to connect 1 million gigabits.
The researchers were able to transmit 1.8 Pbit/s, which is twice the global internet traffic. Only the light from one source could carry it. A custom-designed optical chip is used to create a rainbow spectrum of many colors from a single laser light. A single laser can be used to create hundreds of frequencies in a single chip.
The teeth on a comb are the same distance from each other as the colors are. Each color can be isolated and used to create a picture. The frequencies can be sent back and forth over an optical fiber. The researchers have found a huge amount of data.
Thousands can be replaced with one laser.
A single chip can carry 1.8 Pbit/s, which, with modern commercial equipment, would otherwise require more than 1000 lasers.
The head of the research group that created the chip is a professor at the university.
Victor Torres Company says that the chip has high optical power and is interesting for advanced optical communications.
The chip wasn't designed for this application.
Some of the characteristic parameters were achieved by happenstance. With the help of my team, we are able to reverse engineer the process and achieve with high reproducibility microcombs.
There is a huge potential for scaling.
The researchers created a model that looked at the fundamental potential for data transmission with a single chip similar to the one used in the experiment. The possibilities for scaling up the solution were huge.
Professor Oxenlwe is the Head of the Center of excellence for Silicon Photonics for optical communications at DTU.
We will be able to transmit up to 100 Pbit/s with the help of a single chip and a single laser." The reason for this is that we can use the frequencies as parallel sources with which to transmit data because our solution is so large. The qualities of the comb, which we use for efficient data transmission, do not need to be amplified.
The way you pack light is this.
Light is packed with data. Waves of light are used here.
Changing these properties creates signals. The signals can be used as data signals if they are translated into one or zeros.
The internet power consumption is reduced.
The solution the researchers came up with boded well for the future use of the internet.
Hundreds of thousands of the lasers located at internet hubs and data centers all of which consume power and generate heat could be replaced with our solution. "We have an opportunity to contribute to achieving an internet that leaves a smaller climate footprint."
Even though the researchers have broken the petabit barrier for a single laser source and a single chip in their demonstration, there is still some development work ahead.
The laser source in the optical chip is being integrated all over the world and we are working on that as well. The more components we can integrate in the chip, the better the whole transmitter will be. Leif Katsuo Oxenlwe believes that it will be an efficient optical transmitter.
The research is in a journal.
More information: A. A. Jørgensen et al, Petabit-per-second data transmission using a chip-scale microcomb ring resonator source, Nature Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01082-z Journal information: Nature Photonics
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