Polymer Optical Transmitters Go Even Faster

Whispers_in_the_dark writes "Scientific American is running an article on how a new type of polymer sandwich could be used in the future to push lightwave encoding of data up to around 200 GHz instead of the 10 GHz that is the upper bound today. The best part is that the new deviceswill be cheaper to produce than the current ones, after mass production presumably."

Comments

Re:Fixing?

[Myco]

My understanding is that the cost of the medium (fiber itself) is quite low. The expense comes in when you need to terminate it, boost the signal, etc. Not to mention the trouble of digging trenches and laying fiber, of course.

When they do lay fiber, I believe (that is, I read in a Slashdot comment which seemed plausible for once) that they lay like 2 dozen cables when they only need one, just so they don't have to go digging again. So if a cable goes bad, they'd just switch to a good one at the endpoints, I suppose.

Re:Application

[BMagneton]

After checking your posting history, I'm going to ignore the the inevitable YHBT and respond, since you seem to have garnered a high rating anyway without exhibiting anything more than a buzzword knowledge of a related (but not specifically relevant) subject.

Go into your University Library, sit down at one of the nice P-II's , and point your browser to Science Online, surf to the current issue and article ("Broadband Modulation of Light by Using an Electro-Optic Polymer") and quit whining about paper copies. In fact, you can probably do this from nearly anywhere in .edu.

Also, to correct the opinion of anyone else out there, this article is not about a fiber. This polymer device is an Electro-Optical modulator, a gadget used to transfer electrical signals onto optical waveforms inside a fiber. To repeat, this is not a type of fiber. Modulators are absolutely critical components in optical communications. They have little to do specifically with secure quantum communications.

It is, however, an extremely fast modulator. You can currently buy 40-50 GHz response modulators packaged and ready to go. Historically, polymer modulators have been a bit higher power and tend to degrade (decay) more over time than the competing technology.

One interesting milestone to note is that communications systems go up in factors of four. Current implementation in the ground is 10 Gb/s. Current state of the art (that a slew of telecom startups are crashing and burning selling because no one is buying) is 40 Gb/s. This is the first modulator I've seen that might do 160 Gb/s.

BMagneton