World’s fastest data transmission speed record broken again, paving the way for the increasingly immediate transmission of knowledge repositories around the world. The team behind this feat are researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their new technology leverages a single laser and a single custom-designed optical chip to deliver a throughput of 1.8 Pbit/s (petabits per second), twice his traffic on the global Internet today. make it possible.
In terms of scale, the same data transmission record was broken in August 2020 with a then-impressive 178 Tbit/s (Terabits per second). That’s fast enough to download Netflix’s then-existing catalog in less time than he counts Mississippi. But that speed is only about 10% of the maximum throughput announced today. That’s a tenfold improvement in technology in less than three years.
Part of the secret sauce behind this record comes from a unique optical chip that can take input from a single infrared laser and create a spectrum of many colors. Each color represents a frequency similar to the teeth of a comb and is perfectly and equally distinguishable from one another (this is exactly the process by which we distinguish colors, the way light matter reflects back towards us). by detecting the different frequencies that And since these multiple frequencies are completely distinguishable from each other by discrete distances set between each, that information can be transmitted over each of these frequencies (or channels). More colors/frequencies/channels allowed more data to be transmitted, leading to a new transmission speed world record of 1.8 Pbit/s.
With today’s optical technology, it would take about 1,000 different lasers to generate the same amount of wavelengths to transmit all this information. It’s a problem in itself. Each additional laser increases energy consumption, increases the number of points of failure, and makes the setup more difficult to manage.
Victor Torres Company, a professor at Chalmers Institute of Technology and head of the research group that developed and manufactured the chip, explained the team’s work:
“What is special about this chip is that it produces a frequency comb with ideal properties for fiber optic communications. It has high optical power and covers a wide bandwidth within the spectral region of interest for advanced optical communications. ‘ he said.
Interestingly, like many other scientific “failures”, the original design goal was not to break the world transmission throughput record.
“In fact, some of the characteristic parameters were not by design, but by chance,” added Victor Torres Company. “However, due to the efforts of my team, we are now able to reverse engineer the process and achieve a highly repeatable microcomm for our target application in telecommunications.”
This research also has practical applications that should be scaled out of the lab. It’s not the idea that this tech will grab headlines and be left in the vaporware hallway. According to Professor Leif Katsuo Oksenrowe, director of DTU’s Silicon Photonics Center for Optical Communications (SPOC), the technology shows great potential for scale-up.
“According to our calculations, a single chip and a single laser manufactured by Chalmers University of Technology can transmit up to 100 Pbit/s. But our solution is also scalable in that we split the frequency comb into many spatial copies, optically amplify them, and use them as parallel sources that can transmit data. but without sacrificing comb quality for spectrally efficient data transmission.”
It’s amazing to think about so much information that it strains a 100 Pbit/s connection, which is about 100 times the traffic flow of today’s Internet. But as the saying goes, if you build a highway, there will be more traffic.
