Terabit comms moves closer

University of Sydney scientists have developed a photonic integrated circuit that can not only increase internet network speeds making them 60 times faster but can act as traffic monitors to keep the speed high and error free.

The PIC caused major interest in July last year when ARC Federation Fellow Prof Ben Eggleton announced the extraordinary speed of the 'scratch on a piece of glass'.

"We realised that with this chip we'd effectively unblocked the bottleneck of internet traffic but without constant monitoring you can't keep that traffic flowing. What we didn't realise at the time was our chip's versatility — it not only allows high rates of data transmission but monitors the integrity of that transmission."

Complicated electronic measuring instruments that can cost up to $1 million dollars are currently used in scientific research.

"Electronics simply cannot match the speed and value of the PIC," said Eggleton, who claims these can be replaced by one elegant photonic chip, which is the size of a thumbnail and uses far less power than electronics making it far more energy efficient.