Another cut, more or less of the same.
Silkroad was formerly SynComm Inc. according to this account from CMP Media Inc web site:
techweb.com
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November 09, 1998, Issue: 1034
Section: News
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Startup demos photonic solution to hike bandwidth
Margaret Quan
New York - Startup Silk Road Inc. (San Diego) last week demonstrated a photonically derived solution that enables the transmission of voice, video and data signals on a single wavelength at the speed of light through fiber-optic cable.
Silk Road transmitted 144 distinct TV programming signals from a video wall with 144 monitors to a second video wall through a strand of fiber-optic cable at 93 Gbits/second.
Silk Road's technology simultaneously carries voice, video and data signals over long distances on the backs of photons in a bidirectional laser beam that does not have to be replicated or amplified.
Company executives said their photonics solution can be scaled from a network backbone down to a local-area network. Silk Road plans to introduce its first transmitter and receiver products early next year.
Silk Road (formerly SynComm Inc.) is promoting its photonics-based technology as an alternative to dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), a transmission technology that provides wide bandwidth across networks.
Unlike WDM, which uses multiple wavelengths that must be reconditioned to eliminate crosstalk, Silk Road said its single-wavelength solution presents no chance for crosstalk or signal interruption.
The technology allows information to be added or removed with a simple beam splitter, so information is available to all nodes in a network at any time and there is no need to disrupt a transmission to add or drop data.
In Silk Road's signal-transmission scheme, light is generated from a source and photons that escape from a cavity form a laser beam. As the laser beam shoots down an optical fiber, an external optical modulator narrows the beam and enables electronic signals to be embedded into the beam.
The embedded signals are tagged with proprietary frequency-ID tags. These tags, which remain linked to the signals, travel down the fiber without interfering with one another.
At the receiving end, a key for each tag is matched up with the correct transmission channel to unlock the data, voice or video to be received.
SilkRoad calls the technology refractive synchronization communication, which depicts the behavior of the electromagnetic wave inside a crystal of the modulator.
SilkRoad's technology is broadly described in a U.S. patent, awarded on Oct. 6 to James R. Palmer, the founder and chief scientist for Silk Road, for a Stabilized Distributed Feedback Semiconductor Laser. The initial patent was deliberately obscure to protect the company's intellectual property, executives said. SilkRoad has submitted 250 additional patent claims that further detail the company's work.
Palmer served as chief optical scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative project and won awards for his optics work.
Asked why other companies haven't pursued similar technology to obtain greater bandwidth, Robert Freeman, vice president of operations for Silk Road, said others have focused their money and resources on WDM technology.
Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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