(November 5, 2013) High-speed communication just got a turbo
boost, thanks to a new laser technology developed at the University of Illinois
that transmits error-free data over fiber optic networks at a blazing fast 40
gigabits per second – the fastest in the United States.
Milton Feng, the Nick Holonyak
Jr. Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, demonstrated the tiny, fast
device along with postdoctoral researcher Fei Tan, graduate students Mong-Kai
Wu and Michael Liu, and Holonyak, who is an emeritus professor. The team
published its results in the journal IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
As computation shifts into the
petascale and beyond, processor speeds have outstripped transfer speeds,
creating a bottleneck and hindering applications. Anyone who has tried to
stream video over a dial-up Internet connection knows that the fastest processor
won’t help the file load quicker. And in the age of “big data” and cloud
computing, there’s a lot of information swirling among servers.