One research group has significantly improved the transmission of fiber-optic data by using only one computer chip to transmit 1.84 petabits of data per second, roughly twice the total internet traffic (or about 230 million photo downloads per second).
Asbjrn Arvad Jrgensen of the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and his colleagues from Denmark, Sweden and Japan shared a stream of data into a variety of channels with a technology that makes it possible to build optical components on computer chips known as photonic chips.
The team divided the stream into 37 sections for each fiber optic cable core, then into 223 chunks of data in the electromagnetic spectrum and transmitted them all at once over 7.9 kilometers without interrupting each other.
Although the data transfer rate is not as fast as the official data transfer rates of 10.66 petabits per second, Jrgensen believes that they can improve the current configuration and create an even smaller on-chip design the size of a matchbox. Instead of running multiple lasers in parallel, they want to reduce the devices to silicon level.
The team also believes that their system, if built to the size of a small server, will be able to transmit as much data as 8,251 matchbox-sized devices now do in a single parallel system.
The sources for this piece include an article in PCGamer.
