Ian Grayson10 July 2008, 12:00 AM
A team of Australian research scientists has made a radical breakthrough that could radically increase the speed of the backbone optical networks at the core of the internet.
Led by University of Sydney physics professor Ben Eggleton, the team has created a switch embedded in a silicon chip. The chip uses small scratches on the surface of a piece of glass to switch optical network traffic at speeds of up to 640 gigabits per second.
Traditionally switching network traffic has necessitated converting it from light into electrical signals and then back again. However, with the massive speeds now used in backbone networks, such a multi-stage approach is becoming a bottleneck.
“For the past 20 years, bandwidth has been made cheaper by increasing core network speeds,” Prof Eggleton told APCMag.com. “We’re now looking at the prospect of terabit-per-second speeds which poses real challenges when it comes to switching as it’s just too fast for electronics to cope."
The team, working with the university’s Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), has built a proof-of-concept chip that is currently being evaluated by another laboratory in Europe.
Prof Eggleton stresses that it is early days for the technology, but early indications are that it has the potential to radically alter the way core backbone networks operate.
“The switch chip essentially uses one beam of light to control another,” he says. “The scratches create a photonic circuit that does the job traditionally done by electronics.”
Eggleton says the circuit ‘guides’ data in much the same way as trains are guided from one track to another. Eventually it is hoped the concept will be able to switch networks running at multi terabit-per-second speeds.
As well as the speeds at which it can operate, the chip is also impressive because of its simplicity and therefore low cost. This should eventually allow it to be incorporated into a wide variety of network switching and control equipment.
The CUDOS team has worked with other researchers at the Australian National University and the Technical University of Denmark on the project. A paper on the breakthrough was delivered at a conference in Sydney tonight.