Australian & Danish researchers discover they can dramatically boost the throughput of existing networks by scratching photonic technology to incite it up to 1 terabit per second capacity.

The scratch is actually in a photonic integrated circuit that uses the 'scratch' as a switching-path (like when trains switch from one track to another). The switch takes only one picosecond to change so in 1 second the switch can turn on and off about 1 million times.

According to the Centre for Ultra-high bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), the scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error-free and unlimited access to the internet anywhere in the world. The CUDOS research is based on collaboration between teams at the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, and the Technical University of Denmark.

The CUDOS research program wants to create ultrahigh-speed all-optical signal processing on a single photonic chip by combining micro-photonics and nonlinear photonics. These all-optical signal processors could be the key enabling technology for the next gen of ultrahigh bandwidth optical communication systems.

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