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Electronics Inside Optical Fiber

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the they're-inside-the-wires dept.

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."

2 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Upgrading? by mplex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What happens when you want to upgrade your transceivers? Where I work, we are still using the same fiber from the 80's that used to carry 2Mb that is now carrying gig. I don't see how embedding the electronics in the glass would do anything but make it obsolete in the near future. That's the great thing about fiber, you just upgrade the end point equipment and scale it up for more bandwidth.

  2. Interesting Thoughts by LightningTH · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People are talking about optical fiber and think of it as it is now. What about fiber inside the CPU core, or inside of cameras. This would allow for even smaller electronics and taking up even less room.