A team of scientists from universities in Denmark, Sweden and Japan has successfully transferred more than 1 petabit of data per second on a single chip. That’s over 1 million gigabits of data per second over fiber optic cables, or basically the entire internet traffic.
Researchers (AA Jørgensen, D. Kong, LK Oxenløwe) and their team successfully demonstrated 1.84 petabits of data transmission over 7.9 km of fiber cable using just one chip. It’s not as fast as other alternatives with larger and bulkier systems that peaked at 10.66 petabits, but scale is key here. The proposed system is very compact.
By splitting the data stream into 37 sections (one for each core of a fiber optic cable) and further splitting each stream into 223 channels, the researchers were able to remove the large amount of interference that slows down optical systems, It uses a single chip to achieve data transmission equivalent to the Internet.
“I would say the average global internet traffic is about 1 petabit per second. (opens in new tab)“We are sending an incredible amount of data, basically less than a square millimeter. [of cable]This shows that with an internet connection we can go much farther than we do now. ”
The researchers also theorize that such systems could support speeds of up to 100 petabits per second in massively parallel systems.
research paper (opens in new tab) It relies on a series of studies on the concept of single-chip solutions that span multiple researchers and papers. (opens in new tab)‘. Catchy.
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Essentially, high-speed data transmission, which often requires fiber optic cables and bulky equipment, is now being miniaturized into smaller on-chip packages. Much of this equipment can be scaled down to the silicon level instead of multiple lasers in parallel with their own set of challenges. This eliminates some of the problems of sending large data packages over long distances and at high speeds.
Most of these new breakthroughs are microcombs, methods of generating constant and measurable frequencies of light. Not only do they help shrink the requirements of such systems, they have recently seen breakthroughs when added to CMOS chips. (opens in new tab).
In fact, more can be added to the CMOS chip to further integrate this whole system, says Jørgensen. So if this currently looks fast and compact, it’s only a matter of time before a more integrated and fast version is developed. Stacking these devices further into one parallel system, he can achieve mega bandwidth in one server rack.
Fundamentally, the Internet has a lot of room to grow.
