Research team: Terabit per second communications one step closer

Staff Writers
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 17:55

IT Industry - Market

University of Sydney scientists say they have developed a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) that can not only increase Internet networks speeds making them 60 times faster but can act as traffic monitors to keep the speed high and error-free.
 

The PIC caused wide interest in July 2008 when ARC Federation Fellow, Professor Ben Eggleton, announced the extraordinary speed of the ‘scratch on a piece of glass.’

In an announcement by the University in the past few days, Professor Eggleton says “we realised that with this chip we’d effectively unblocked the bottleneck of Internet traffic but without constant monitoring you can’t keep that traffic flowing. What we didn’t realise at the time was our chip’s versatility – it not only allows high rates of data transmission but monitors the integrity of that transmission.”

Professor Eggleton is the Director, Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) and the new Institute of Photonic and Optical Science (IPOS) due to be launched in April by Australia’s Minister for Science, Senator Kim Carr.

In the recent announcement, Professor Eggleton says that complicated electronic measuring instruments that can cost up to $1million dollars are currently used in scientific research, but that “electronics simply cannot match the speed and value of the PIC.” He claimed “ these can be replaced by one elegant photonic chip, which is the size of a thumbnail and uses far less power than electronics making it far more energy efficient.”

The professor said “our PIC will cost around $100 and have a life span of about ten years.  You just can’t beat that in terms of cost and efficiency.”

The research team’s paper, Photonic-chip-based radio-frequency spectrum analyser with terahertz bandwidth, was due to be published in Nature Photonics on 15 February.