Washington, DC--Over the last decade, a development team at Infinera (Sunnyvale, CA) has pioneered the design and manufacture of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) aimed at meeting the growing need for communications bandwidth. The team has now achieved a record one trillion bits per second (1 Terabit/s or 1 Tbps) speed on a single indium phosphide PIC chip. The findings will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC; www.ofcnfoec.org) taking place March 6-10 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
With worldwide Internet data traffic increasing by 50% each year, Infinera recognizes that telecommunications companies that handle this digital torrent must be able to economically expand the capacities of their networks while also adapting to new, more-efficient data-handling technologies. "Traditional transponder-based system architectures are inflexible and costly and time-consuming to upgrade," said Radhakrishnan Nagarajan, research fellow at Infinera and a senior member of Infinera’s PIC development team. "Our PIC approach enables us to make optical networks more powerful, flexible and reliable than ever before using equipment that is significantly smaller, less expensive and uses much less energy."
Infinera’s latest PIC is at the heart of a new 10-channel receiver, each channel operating at 100 Gbit/s data rates. This is the first in the industry to achieve a capacity of 1 Terabit/s on a single photonic integrated chip. It contains more than 150 optical components—such as frequency tunable local oscillator (LO) lasers, devices for mixing the LO and incoming signals, variable optical attenuators for LO power control, a spectral demultiplexer to separate the individual wavelength channels, and 40 balanced photodetector (receiver/transmitter) pairs—all integrated onto a chip smaller than a fingernail.
Infinera expects PICs with a capability of a terabit or more to be commercially available within a few years. The company has announced that a 500 Gbps PIC will be available in 2012.
Nagarajan’s presentation at OFC/NFOEC, titled "10-channel, 100Gbit/sec per channel dual polarization coherent QPSK, monolithic InP receiver photonic integrated circuit," will take place Monday, March 7 at 3:15 p.m. in the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Since 1975, the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC) has provided an annual backdrop for the optical communications field to network and share research and innovations. In 2005, OFC joined forces with the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (NFOEC) creating the largest and most comprehensive international event for optical communications. OFC/NFOEC is managed by the Optical Society (OSA) and co-sponsored by OSA, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Communications Society (IEEE/ComSoc) and the IEEE Photonics Society.
SOURCE: OSA; www.osa.org/About_Osa/Newsroom/News_Releases/Releases/02.2011/OFCTerabitChip.aspx
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