New Routers Marry Light and Silicon to Cut Down on Power and Ramp Up Speed
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) EurekAlert! Press Release
Tomorrow's ultra-fast broadband may be limited not by the speed at which data can be sent, but by the electrical power needed to route data to millions of users. A new technology that weds light and silicon hopes to keep up the massive connectivity of a faster Internet by cutting down on its power consumption.
To send a single stream of data to many computers, networks have to "multicast," sending out multiple copies of a single input signal carried by an optical fiber. With electronic switching, this requires converting optical data into digital electronic data, making copies in the electronic domain, and converting electronic copies back into optical data. The amount of power that electronic multicasters require to do this is large and will increase exponentially as the speed of data transmission goes up, an energy bottleneck for the industry.
To solve this problem, a team of researchers at Columbia University and Cornell University has built a purely optical device that cuts out the energy-hungry electronic middleman. They use a pulsing laser to clone the light coming in from an optical fiber into eight identical waves going out, a process called "four-wave mixing." This all happens in silicon one of the most efficient materials for this process directly embedded on a computer chip. So though the multicasting itself doesn't require electronics, other electronic components, like switches, could be installed on the chip to modify the signal as it passes through.
The device can handle speeds of more than 160G and draws several orders of magnitude less power than current electronic devices. "We're looking ahead to next-generation networks that will run at terabits per second," says Keren Bergman of Columbia University. "You just can't do that kind of multicasting in electronics."
This press release is in reference to Aleksandr Biberman's OFC conference talk "First Demonstration of On-Chip Wavelength Multicasting".