By Lotte Krull
This is a breakthrough of epic proportions as a single chip has set a new data transfer record of 1.8 Petabytes per second.
A Petabyte is equal to 1000 Terabytes or approximately 500 billion pages of standard printed text. The entire Library of Congress could be streamed 100 times in a single second.
The implication for global digitization is inconceivable
An international group of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, have achieved staggering data transmission speeds.
They are the first to transmit more than one petabit per second (Pbit/s) using only a single laser and optical chip.
A petabit corresponds to 1 million gigabits.
In the experiment, the researchers successfully transmitted 1.8 Pbit/s, twice the total global Internet traffic.
And they are carried only by light from an optical source.
The light source is a custom-designed optical chip that can use light from a single infrared laser to create a rainbow spectrum of many colors, ie, many frequencies.
Thus, a single frequency (color) of a laser can be multiplied into hundreds of frequencies (colors) on a single chip.
All colors are fixed at a certain frequency distance from each other – just like the teeth on a comb – so it’s called a frequency comb.
Each color (or frequency) can then be isolated and used to print the data.
The frequencies can then be reassembled and sent over an optical fiber, thereby transmitting data. Even a massive volume of data, as researchers have discovered.
ONE LASER REPLACES THOUSANDS
The experimental demonstration showed that a single chip could easily support 1.8 Pbit/s, requiring more than 1000 lasers with modern and state-of-the-art commercial equipment.
The company’s Victor Torres, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, is the head of the research group that developed and manufactured the chip.
“What is special about this chip is that it produces a frequency comb with ideal characteristics for fiber optic communications – it has high optical power and covers a bandwidth within the spectral region that is interesting for advanced optical communications,” says Victor Torres Company. .
Interestingly enough, the chip was not optimized for this particular application.
“Some of the characteristic parameters were achieved by chance and not by design,” says the Victor Torres Company.
“However, with my team’s efforts, we can now change the process and achieve highly reproducible microcombs for targeted applications in telecommunications.”
ESCALATION
In addition, the researchers created a computational model to theoretically examine the real potential for data transmission with a single chip identical to the one used in the experiment.
The calculations showed a great potential for scaling the solution.
Professor Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe, Director of the Center of Excellence for Silicon Photonics for Optical Communications (SPOC) at DTU, says:
“Our calculations show that – with the single chip made by Chalmers University of Technology and a single laser – we will be able to transmit up to 100 Pbit/s.
This is because our solution is scalable – both in terms of creating multiple frequencies and splitting the frequency comb into multiple spatial replicas and then optically amplifying them and using them as parallel sources with which to transmit data.
Although the comb replicas must be amplified, we do not lose the qualities of the comb, which we use for spectrally efficient data transmission.”
Reduces Internet power consumption
The researchers’ solution bodes well for the Internet’s future energy consumption.
“In other words, our solution offers the potential to replace the hundreds of thousands of lasers located in Internet centers and data centers, all of which absorb energy and generate heat. We have an opportunity to contribute to achieving an internet that leaves a smaller climate footprint,” says Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe.
Although 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 before the solution can be implemented in our current communication systems, according to Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe.
“All over the world, there is work being done to integrate the laser source into the optical chip, and we are working on that as well.”
“The more components we can integrate on the chip, the more efficient the entire transmitter will be. That is, the laser, the chip that creates the comb, data modulators and any amplifier elements. It will be an extremely efficient optical transmitter of data signals,” says Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe.
