University of California at San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic and his team have demonstrated the first real-time sampling of a 320 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) channel, in an effort to meet the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) goal of developing
the first Terabit-scale technology for optical processing. The technology could have widespread ramifications for networking, computing, defense and other industries.
Developed in the Photonics Systems Lab of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the technology is part of a DARPA-funded program on parametric optical processing built on development of wideband optical mixers. The research led to a new technique that maps an optical fiber's geometry for variations of more than a couple of nanometers.
Radic said, "A little over one year into the project, we have achieved one-third of that speed, which is about an order-of-magnitude faster than the advanced commercial optical transport at 40 Gb/s." In the future, Radic expects to demonstrate the scaling of the technology to 640 Gb/s, and eventually to hit 1 Tb/s by the end of the four-year DARPA contract.
