Internet speeds to up to 100 times faster

University of Sydney physicists have developed an optical chip that
could potentially improve ‘Internet speeds to up to 100 times faster
than current Australia’s networks.’ According to the Sydney Morning Herald, these chalcogenide glass photonic chips
will be very cheap to produce as they’re based on plain glass. As said
the lead researcher, ‘we are talking about networks that are
potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any
more.’ He adds that these chips could be scaled to operate at data
rates approaching 640 Gb/s — the equivalent to transmitting
approximately 17 complete DVDs per second! These chips could be
commercially available in 5 years with the possible first network
deployments in Japan. But read more…

You can see above CUDOS researcher Neil Baker holding a chalcogenide
glass photonic chip which allows all-optical signal processing.
Professor Ben Eggleton appears in the background with two other
researchers. (Credit: CUDOS)

This research project has been led for 4 years by Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University of Sydney. Please look at the research section about Photonic crystals
for more details. Before going further, here is what this document says
about chalcogenide glass photonic crystals. “Chalcogenide glasses
combine a large optical nonlinearity with strong photosensitivity,
making them ideal for studying nonlinear photonic effects. Chalcogenide
glass photonic crystals are fabricated at the ANU by milling holes in
chalcogenide glass films using a focused ion beam. We characterise
these structures by measuring transmission and reflection versus
incident angle and wavelength.”

Now, here is a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald article.
“The device, a photonic integrated circuit, could overcome the gridlock
that occurs when information travelling along optical fibres at the
speed of light has to be processed by slow, old-fashioned electronic
components. This would make almost instantaneous, error-free and
unlimited access to the internet possible anywhere in the world,
Professor Eggleton said. The market would
ultimately decide which technologies were introduced to meet the
skyrocketing demand for faster and cheaper downloads. ‘But our job at
CUDOS is to go out to the absolute limit, and demonstrate in the lab
what is possible,’ he said.”

In “Breaking the Internet’s glass ceiling,”
a University of Sydney news release (July 9, 2008), you’ll find
additional details. “‘This is a critical building block and a
fundamental advance on what is already out there. We are talking about
networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing
the consumer any more,’ says Federation Fellow Professor Ben Eggleton,
Director of CUDOS, based within the School of Physics at the University
of Sydney. Eggleton, whose team beat their deadline by a year, says
that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate but
optical fibres have a huge capacity to deliver more. ‘The scratched
glass we’ve developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit,’ he
says.”

This research work has been presented at the 13th Opto-Electronics
and Communications Conference (OECC) held in Sydney, on July 7-10,
2008, under the title “Error-free 640Gb/s demultiplexing using a chalcogenide planar waveguidechip” (PDF format, 3 pages, 268 KB).

The team also published a highly technical article for Optics and Photonics News, “Chalcogenide Glass Photonic Chips, Signal processing for the next generation of the Internet (PDF format, 6 pages, 484 KB). The picture above comes from this document.

Here is a key part of the conclusion of the paper. “Chalcogenide
glasses offer an interesting and exciting new platform for developing
all-optical signal processing devices for the photonic equivalent of
the electronic chip. These devices will be able to demultiplex high
data rate signals, convert the carrier wavelength, and perform other
functions, such as optical signal regeneration and packet buffering and
switching. Further improvements in device performance are needed in
order to achieve all-optical signal processing at data rates for future
telecommunications applications (e.g., at 160 to 640 Gb/s).”

Finally, if you want to learn more about these photonic crystals, take a look at an Elsevier scientific publication, Photonics and Nanostructures - Fundamentals and Applications and read the abstract of a paper called “Chalcogenide glass photonic crystals”
(Volume 6, Issue 1, April 2008, Pages 3-11). “All-optical switching
devices are based on a material possessing a nonlinear optical
response, enabling light to control light, and are enjoying renewed
interest. Photonic crystals are a promising platform for realizing
compact all-optical switches operating at very low power and integrated
on an optical integrated circuit. In this review, we show that by
making photonic crystals from a highly nonlinear chalcogenide glass, we
have the potential to integrate a variety of active devices into a
photonic chip.” Interestingly, you cannot access the full paper for
free from the abstract, but you can from the home page of the journal —
at least today.

Sources: Deborah Smith, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, July 10, 2008; and various websites