Science Alert  October 25, 2022
As essential core technologies for optical fibre communication are approaching their limits of size, speed and energy-efficiency, there is a need for new technologies that offer further scaling of data transmission capacity. An international team of researchers (Denmark, Sweden, Japan) has shown that a single optical frequency-comb source based on a silicon nitride ring resonator supports data capacities in the petabit-per-second regime. They experimentally demonstrated transmission of 1.84 Pbit s–1 over a 37-core, 7.9-km-long fibre using 223 wavelength channels derived from a single microcomb ring resonator producing a stabilized dark-pulse Kerr frequency comb. They presented a theoretical analysis that indicated that a single, chip-scale light source should be able to support 100 Pbit s–1 in massively parallel space-and-wavelength multiplexed data transmission systems. Their findings could mark a shift in the design of future communication systems, targeting device-efficient transmitters and receivers…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
The modelled communication system. Credit: Nature Photonics volume 16, pages798–802 (2022)