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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."
Can the imbedded semiconductor actually generate light pulses? I remember reading about a new breakthrough that would allow this, but the article doesn't make it clear as to whether or not it is used in this case.
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So what if the electronic components in the fiber fail? Is someone going to have to repull that line? If so, wouldn't that make it significantly more expencive then replacing a module that is plugged in between two fiber optic lines?
-Rick
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From Southampton rather than some random blog.
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.
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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.
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.