University of Sydney postgraduate student, Trung Duc Vo, has recently broken the barrier on data transmission speeds with the development of a photonic transmitter chip for Ethernet networks.
The $100 photonic chip enables transmission of high quality 1.28 Tbits/s along a single optical channel by avoiding the usual electrical-optical-electrical conversion in information processing. By doing so, the chip avoids the usual cooling time required by traditional transistor electronics.
Vo's breakthrough discovery is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) and was also the result of a collaboration between the Australian National University and Danish Technical University. It was recently presented and tested at the Optical Fibre Communications Conference in San Diego, USA.
CUDOS director, Professor Ben Eggleton, said that Vo's research is still in its early stages but if it does produce consistent fruitful results, then CUDOS is likely to spin off a company and commercialise itself.
"The technology will probably be sold in instrumentation markets before we bring it to the telecommunications market." Eggleton said.
The creation of the chip coincides with Mike Quigley's announcement about rising bandwidth demand. This year, Google has also trialed 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home broadband in the US. AARNet, meanwhile already uses multi-Gbps networks.