Electronics Inside Optical Fiber

Ben writes "Science Blog reports a team from Penn State and the UK has built electronic compenents inside optical fiber. As the story describes it, if you think of the fiber as a water main, the structure places the pumping station inside the pipe. The goal is to figure out how to most efficiently exchange info between the fibers that carry data and the devices that manipulate it."

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[Anonymous Coward]

From Southampton rather than some random blog.

Not really a pumping station inside the pipe

[LehiNephi]

It's not really a pump inside a pipe. It's like a pump inside a submarine inside the pipe. If you RTFA, the fiber is actually in a tube-like form. The electronics aren't actually embedded in the glass itself, they merely reside in a purpose-made pocket. I initally wondered if having a circuit in the middle of a fiber would reduce the transmission distance, but apparently it won't interfere.

It'll be interesting to see if this gets any traction in the real world. I guess I don't see much benefit beyond a possible reduction in latency.