Fastest single laser fibre speeds ever: 26 Tbps
BBC recently reported that research published in Nature Photonics showed that speeds of 26 Terabits per second (Tbps) over optical fibre is possible using a single laser.
Technologies such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which uses a number of lasers to transmit data on multiple wavelengths (or “colours”) of light, have allowed speeds of up to 100 Terabits per second to be demonstrated.
However, BBC reported that according to Wolfgang Freude, a co-author of the current paper from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, this required “something like” 370 lasers – a costly endeavour.
According to the BBC, Professor Freude and his colleagues have worked out how to create comparable data rates using just one laser with short pulses, with each pulse containing a “frequency comb” or a number of discrete wavelengths of light. These wavelengths can mix together when the pulses are sent onto an optical fibre, resulting in about 325 different wavelengths.
BBC said that the trick to this transmission technique is on the receiving end where an optical Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used to separate the data streams.
The Fourier transform is a well-known mathematical trick which BBC said is used to essentially extract the different colours from an input beam based solely on the times that the different parts of the beam arrive.
According to the BBC article, the research team splits the incoming beam into different paths that arrive at different times, simplifying the problem of stringing together all the data in the different colours into one of organising data that arrives at different times.
Freude said that their design outperforms earlier approaches by moving all the time delays further apart, BBC reported, with Freude adding that the technology could be integrated onto a silicon chip.
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