Accessing Internet at 640 Gb/s?

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.

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.”