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Exabit Transmission Speeds May Be Possible
adeelarshad82 writes "Scientists at UC Berkeley were able to shrink a graphene optical modulator down to 25 square microns in size (small enough to include in silicon circuitry) and were able to modulate it at a speed of 1GHz. The researchers say that modulation speeds of up to 500GHz are theoretically possible. According to the research, due to the high modulation speeds, a graphene modulator can transmit a huge amount of data using spectral bandwidth that conventional modulators can only dream of. Professor Xiang Zhang, in an attempt to boil his group's new findings into consumer-speak, puts it this way: 'If graphene modulators can actually operate at 500GHz, we could soon see networks that are capable of petabit or exabit transmission speeds, rather than megabits and gigabits.'"
I fail to see the point unless we also get processing speeds able to keep up with the data.
And specially storage speeds. SSDs don't cut it.
So in theory if you can get an electrical signal to the graphene, you can use it to modulate laser light up to 500ghz. Awesome!
That just leaves two fatal flaws:
1. You need to modulate the electric signal with useful information at 500ghz. I'm not an expert, but it seems like we're a long way off from being able to do that. Can anyone comment?
2. How do you demodulate such a signal?
Will graphene computing be the new quantum computing henceforth?
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
You have to remember that the more bandwidth you want to deliver to the end user, the more you've got to have in the backhaul. Like if at work you want to deliver true 1 gigabit to 1000 people's desktops, you can't very well then have a 1 gigabit connection out to your data center. They won't get a gigabit of performance.
So while speeds like this wouldn't be needed for servers or such, they could be for big links. You want to link big_router_a with big_router_b which have all sorts of very fast connections to smaller routers then maybe this interests you.
Another thing that I have sometimes wondered is: why can't you have a torrent of torrents? That is a torrent that redirects to a bunch of other torrent so as to make collecting larger data sets easier, to avoid repacking to some extend as well.
I know this rambling is a bit of topic, but I think that the speed of the Internet, the speed at which the human race is able to share is directly correlated to the quality of the human experience. That is why I love reading news like this.
Cheers everyone.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
I had no idea conventional modulators had the ability to dream.
With all this extra bandwidth, AT&T will up their quotas from 150GB to 200GB!
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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Should be around 1.2*10^12 libraries of congress per fortnight.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
This technology should be ready for market in about 13.5 years. Going from 1 ghz to 500 ghz with a doubling every 18 months will take 9 periods. Let's add a few years for developing the tools necessary to mass produce and we are at 15-20 years. Obviously there is no reason to believe that this technology will follow a similar growth curve. It likely will be substantially worse. It's nice to know we have some theoretical headroom but there is even less to get excited about here than when there is the proverbial "3 to 5 years" to reach market.
Can we just transmit data through a few kilometers of fiber wound on a spool, demodulate the data and then resend it as a storage mechanism? At 300MHz you store 1bit per meter or 1Kbit per km. At 300GHz you get 1Mbit per km. At 300THz you get 1Gbit per km. At 300 petabit/s you store 1Tbit per km. Of course this storage medium loses data when the power is turned off, but that's OK for some applications. And with 1km of fiber, your data is never more than 3.3 uS away.
The rationale for this will be: such high speed networks are more costly to build, therefore your monthly data cap must be lower, or prices must be vastly higher. Also these measures help prevent piracy. Also less communication is easier for government to monitor.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I'll just be happy when I can get one of these exabit transmissions for my pickup.
They might be possible, but then how would the telecomm giants justify drastically inflated bandwidth prices?
Always look for the money...
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
How many porn movies per second is this?
That is all.
Think of what a boon this will be to the wireless telcos on SMS fees:
That's about a half dozen US annual GDPs of SMS charges racked up every second, over one thin fiber!
Yo Dawg,
I heard you like me so we put my music videos on Xiang Zhang's graphene modulator network so you can watch Xzibit on Exabit.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I haven't done the math, but at 500 GHz it seems like dispersion would make any network longer than a single chip fundamentally unable to use that kind of frequency.
For a mesh network-on-a-chip though, you could probably dumb down the routers a lot (you'd have to to let them operate at that freq), and basically trade inefficient routing for a way higher link rate... basically operate the network such that you can deliver a message 100 times faster than than you can send 1 message. The routers may not even need buffers at that point. But I think there are a lot of problems here.
I think the parent comment is right: 500 GHz modulator is nice and all, but its difficult to use until everything else is at least on the same order of magnitude.
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire