Record 1.84 Petabit/s Data Transfer Achieved with Photonic Chip, Fiber Optic Cable
takyon writes:
Record 1.84 Petabit/s Data Transfer Achieved With Photonic Chip, Fiber Optic Cable
Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen have achieved 1.84 petabits per second data transfers using a single photonic chip connected via a single optical fiber cable. The feat was accomplished over a distance of 7.9 km (4.9 miles). For some perspective regarding this achievement, at any time of day, the average internet bandwidth being used by the whole world's population is estimated to be about 1 petabit/s.
[...] Firstly, the data stream used in the trial was split into 37 lines, with each one sent down a different optical thread in the cable. Each of the 37 data lines were split into 223 data chunks corresponding to zones of the optical spectrum. What this allowed is for creating a "frequency comb" where data was transmitted in different colors at the same time, without interfering with other streams. In other words a "massively parallel space-and-wavelength multiplexed data transmission" system was created. Of course, this splitting, and re-splitting massively increased the potential data throughput supported by a fiber optic cable.
[...] In action, the photonic chip splits a single laser into many frequencies and some processing is required to encode light data for each of the 37 data optical fiber streams. A refined fully capable optical processing device should be possible to build at approximately the size of a match box, according to Jorgensen. This is a similar size to current single color laser transmission devices used by the telecoms industry.
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Journal Reference:
A. A. Jorgensen, D. Kong, M. R. Henriksen, et al.Petabit-per-second data transmission using a chip-scale microcomb ring resonator source (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01082-z) (DX)
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