One chip transmits the entire internet's traffic in a second

A team of researchers have made a huge breakthrough in data transmission by using a single computer chip to transfer 1.84 petabits of data per second, which is twice the internet's traffic.

A group of people from all over the world, including Asbjrn Arvad Jrgensen at the Technical University ofDenmark, used a technology that allows optical components to be built onto computer chips to divide a stream of data into thousands of different channels.

The team split the stream into 37 sections for each fiber optic cable core, then split those sections into 223 data chunks in the electr-magnetic spectrum, so they wouldn't interfere with each other.

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The average internet traffic in the world is less than a petabit. Jrgensen says what we transmit is twice as much. Less than a square millimeter is the amount of data we are sending through. It shows that we can go further than we are with internet connections.

The beauty of this record-breaking achievement by Jrgensen and his team is that they are miniaturizing. Compared to bulkier equipment currently used to achieve the 10.66 petabits per second speeds, the upscaling of a single chip to match or even exceed that transfer rate is going to remain extremely small.

Jrgensen believes that they can improve on the current setup and create a smaller on-chip design. They don't want the equipment to be in parallel.

If the system is built to the size of a small server, it could transmit as much data as 8,251 matchbox-sized devices currently do, according to the team.

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