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Technology moves so fast, it is impossible to tell what revolution will occur next. For instance, what would happen if bandwidth limitation was overcome by a new breakthrough as these articles suggests has happened?
eurekalert.org
New polymers developed by chemists and engineers at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California appear to achieve speed and capacity increases so great that they will revolutionize telecommunications, data processing, sensing and display technologies.
The materials are used to create polymeric electro-optic modulators, or "opto-chips." These microscopic devices perform functions such as translating electrical signals - television, computer, telephone and radar - into optical signals at rates up to 100 gigabytes per second (a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes). Polymeric electro-optic materials can achieve information-processing speeds as great as 10 times those of current electronic devices and have significantly greater bandwidths than electro-optic crystals currently in use. In addition, the new materials require a fraction of a volt of electricity to operate, less than one-sixth what the crystals require.
"These electro-optic modulators will permit real-time communication. You won't have to wait for your computer to download even the largest files," said Larry Dalton, a chemistry professor at both UW and USC who is the overall leader of the research and has full research teams at both universities.
Tests indicate a single modulator measuring one micron (about .000039 inch) can provide more than 300 gigahertz of bandwidth - enough to handle all of a major corporation's telephone, computer, television and satellite traffic.
eurekalert.org
Modulators are the translators of the electro-optic world of communication, encoding electrical signals onto optical beams of information. Improvements in electro-optic materials have increased the speed (broadened the bandwidth) at which these modulators translate, but only at the cost of high operating voltage that limits the strength of the signal and increases its level of distortion. As the Science authors note in their paper, researchers have been on a quest for "the Holy Grail" of modulators, a device that delivers wide bandwidth but that operates with less than one volt.
With this device, Dalton says,"We'll be able to take telephone signals, computer data, tv signals, any type of signal you can think of, put it on fiber optic, route it around the world with almost no optical signal loss, and accomplish this with infinite bandwidth. It has the potential of revolutionizing the way we all function."
Along with its impressive bandwidth and efficiency, the new modulator has another feature that Dalton fears may not be as readily appreciated--ease of integration. The devices can be arranged in a variety of sophisticated, high-density packages without optical energy leaking between them or overheating. This may make them useful components in increasingly powerful computers jam-packed with heat-generating transistors. |
