Wednesday, July 9th, 2008...10:15 pm - Catherine Gleeson
Australian optical chip clocked at 1Tb per second
Nice but relatively random Spaghetti Code sculpture image: George Hart Computer Science Department NY
Heard this on “Heritage Media” channel 702 ABC (AM!) Radio Sydney this morning. Deborah Cameron was interviewing Ben Eggleton of Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) a consortium between five Australian universities: The University of Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney, Australian National University and Swinburne University of Technology. He and his colleagues have developed an optical chip which will apparently unjam the clog which currently occurs at what Eggleton described as the “spaghetti junctions” where the “main freeways” of optical fibre convert to electronically controlled junctions. The chip is essentially a thumbnail sized piece of glass with tiny lithographic scratches on its surface which act as switches. According to Eggleton, the chip was developed at CUDOS, then sent to its development partners in Denmark, who have been testing it over the last 12 months. The results, error-free speeds of up to 1 Terabyte per second were revealed at the Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference in Sydney last night. The technology is simple, cheap and potentially easy to implement fast.
The implications for very very fast video online are immediately easy to perceive. The future of HD video services for example, delivered online and available for Australian communities is looking like a reality and one in the not-too-distant-future - or is it? Despite the fact that the chip is the product of an Australian innovation centre, we shouldn’t hold our collective breath. Until optical fibre is delivered directly to our doors, we won’t be able to experience anything faster than our ol’ 1MB per second… ah the irony.
Wouldn’t it be nice to experience life in a virtual social world at a speed faster than 1MB per second? (see Gary Hayes’ post on Social Virtual Spaces - a must read)
Via ABC Local Radio and ABC Science
Leave a Reply