The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Academics have developed an optical digital-to-analogue converter (oDAC) that promises to rethink how high-speed optical transmission is done.
Professor Ioannis Tomkos
Conceived under the European Commission-funded Flex-Scale project for 6G front-haul, the oDAC also promises terabit links inside the data centre.
The oDAC is expected to deliver a 40 per cent power savings for a 1.6 terabit optical transmitter, which is the ‘send’ path of an optical module.
“It might not be not 50 or 60 per cent, but in this field, even a 25 per cent power saving turns heads,” says Ioannis Tomkos, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, one of the researchers leading the work.
The first proof-of-concept oDAC photonic integrated circuit (PIC) has sent 250 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a single wavelength as part of the European Proteus programme.
Return to Article
