Forget 40G and 100G - researchers at Cornell University in the US have developed a silicon-based optical device that can transport data packets over a single wave at 270 Gbps, all on a single chip and requiring no additional energy.
At the heart of the device is an optical silicon chip called a "time telescope" - which sounds futuristic but is actually an idea first developed over 20 years ago by Brian Kolner at Hewlett-Packard. The basic idea of a time lens is to stretch or compress a light wave over time, rather than spatially as a normal optical lens does.
By using silicon waveguides as the lenses, it's possible to selectively speed up or slow down the different parts of a 10-GHz light pulse encoded with data, lead research author Mark Foster told BBC News. So, for example, if you send a long 10-GHz pulse with a time lens on either end (a "time telescope", if you will), the back half of the pulse speeds up while the other slows down, which basically results in a much shorter pulse carrying the same amount of data.
More importantly, it also does this so "in an energy-efficient manner, because the only power required is that needed to run the laser," according to MIT Technology Review.
The obvious commercial barrier is that existing optical networks still rely on electronics to maintain the integrity of the signal across long distances, as well as the five-nines performance expectations of carriers and their customers. And it's typically the electronic component that serves as the optical bottleneck.