Breaking the information speed limit

Faster information flow has been a permanent human quest since the first hill-top beacons were lit. Now, in the digital era, researchers want to boost data to speeds of 40Gbit/s across entire optical networks. They want to eliminate the bottlenecks and distortions that come from current electronic technologies.

'Optical fibre technology has revolutionised networks by providing high-capacity, point-to-point links but they are interconnected with nodes based on electronic processing, which has speed limits,' said Dr Benn Thomsen of

. Replacing the processors with optical switches would remove these barriers, but they have their own problems - the signals get distorted and implementing the switches efficiently is not easy.

So Thomsen aims to identify and verify suitable optical technologies for processing in dynamic networks to reduce the signal distortions. 'I'll be studying non-linear devices, such as semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and analysing their transfer functions,' he said. 'We need to know if we are able to deal with their less-than-ideal transfer functions in optical network applications.'