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Here's how the Cornell system works. First, a signal is encoded on laser light using a conventional modulator. The light signal is then coupled into the Cornell chip through an optical-fiber coil, which carries it onto a nanoscale-patterned silicon waveguide. Just as a guitar chord is made up of notes from different strings, the signal is made up of different frequencies of light. While on the chip, the signal interacts with light from a laser, causing it to split into these component frequencies. The light travels through another length of cable onto another nanoscale-patterned silicon waveguide, where it interacts with light from the same laser. In the process, the signal is put back together, but with its phase altered. It then leaves the chip by means of another length of optical fiber, at a rate of 270 gigabits per second.
The physics are complex, but the net effect, says Bergman, is to "take a stream of bits that are kind of slow and make them go much faster." The time telescope transmits more data in less time, and does so in an energy-efficient manner, because the only power required is that needed to run the laser.
The Cornell device is one of a series of recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics. "Silicon is this amazing electronic material, and for a long time it was viewed as being a so-so optical material," says Gaeta. Over the past five years, researchers have been overturning this notion. In 2005, researchers at Intel made the first silicon laser; subsequently, other optical components, including modulators--devices for encoding information on light waves--have been made from the material. "People keep saying you have to replace silicon to do very high-speed processing, but silicon may be the way to go," says Gaeta.
Sticking with silicon has two advantages. First, manufacturers already have the infrastructure for making devices out of silicon. "You can leverage all the technologies that have been developed for electronics to make optical devices," says Gaeta. And if electronics and optics can be made out of the same material, it could be much easier to integrate them on the same chip and have each do what it does best: processing in the case of electronics, ultrafast data transmission in the case of optics.
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Sounds like an optical example of a conversion from time-domain to frequency-domain, and back again after a manipulation to compress the signal... I have to agree with ms, "the previous caller", that all the timing would seem to have to be gated relative to the ~tail-end~ of the incoming 10-gig data-stream.
Because if the point is that they've come up with a new-and-improved-way to inject a packet of 10-gig data into a 270-gig carrier channel, that best gets my attention if the packet-duration has been compressed to ~1/27th of its original interval (all the data toggling at 10-gig bit-intervals is now toggling at 270 gig bit-intervals).
In other words, the meaningful spec I seem to be missing is the latency involved -- if I send a packet in THIS end, how long before it comes out the OTHER end (notice I'm NOT asking what the data rate is at that point) relative to the terminator of my input packet.
I've just signed up for a Nature Photonics access, since it sounds like I'm going to have to go directly to the source document to get some graphical descriptions.
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ms
190 Comments
speeding?
This article makes no sense to me. If I have 10 Gbits/s of data coming in, there's no way I can speed up the datarate, because I'd need data that hasn't arrived yet. Of course, I could buffer up a bunch of data and retransmit it faster, but it wouldn't get to its destination any faster than it was orginally sent. Now, if I had multiple streams of 10 Gbit/s data, I could multiplex those into a single higher rate stream. Perhaps that's what you're trying to describe?
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walt
66 Comments
Re: speeding?
Does modulation of 100MHz RF signals with 20kHz acoustical signals make sense? Such are the wonders of modulation.
Reply
anantou
1 Comment
Re: speeding?
The way i understand it is that the transmission of information is a bottleneck as with current approaches it is limited to 10gbs. This new method allows speeds as high as 270gbs WHEN your data is provided at such rate. So although you are right than when your data is at 10gbs there is no way to speed up the transmission when the data come at 270gbs it could come handy :-)
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