Optical fiber and the future of communication

The conference also features a comprehensive technical program with talks covering the latest research related to all aspects of optical communication. Some of the highlights at OFC/NFOEC 2008 include the following.

GOING WIRELESS THROUGH OPTICAL FIBERS

Getting the most out of limited bandwidth will be more and more essential as wireless demands increase in the near future. Zhensheng Jia and Professor Gee-Kung Chang’s optical networking group at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta is showing how to get the most of wireless capacity and bandwidth by splitting wireless signals into separate components and then using optical fiber to carry wireless signals to their destination where they are re-integrated. The long-range linkages are provided by optical fiber, but the last few tens of meters are provided by wireless. The result: users can communicate wirelessly at a much higher bandwidth over a longer distance than is possible without using a fiber.

This convergence of optics and wireless technology is a marriage of necessity—but in the end a happy one because it means potentially supplying a greater and longstanding bandwidth to the end user, who will get the signal wirelessly. In his OFC paper in collaboration with NEC Labs America, Jia will discuss an efficient and flexible method that has been shown via experiments to be able to carry multi-channel wireless signals transmitted over 160 km of optical fiber and through 12 straight-line switches. Talk OMO3, “Transport of 8x2.5-Gb/s Wireless Signals over Optical Millimeter Wave through 12 Straight-Line WSSs and 160-km Fiber for Advanced DWDM Metro Networks” (5:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25 in room 4)

RATCHETING UP DATA RATES

IBM has developed a transceiver capable of boosting chip-to-chip bandwidth on printed circuit boards to 300 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) – the fastest rate to date and a development that ultimately will enable even faster speeds for data transmission in homes and businesses. The device, assembled from relatively low-cost components that might someday be easily mass-manufactured, allows for a bi-directional data rate nearly twice that of an earlier generation IBM transceiver described just a year ago at the 2007 OFC/NFOEC meeting.

This increased bandwidth is the result of two specific advances. First, the new transceiver includes 24 channels for sending and receiving data compared to 16 such channels in the previous device. Second, the modulation rate of each of the transceiver's vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) has been increased by 25 percent to 12.5 billion bits per second. In an effort to speed commercialization efforts, IBM has incorporated lasers and detectors that operate at the industry-standard wavelength of 850 nanometers (nm) instead of the proprietary 985-nn technology used in the earlier transceiver.