Jun 25 2015
Carbon Sciences Inc., focused on developing breakthrough technologies based on graphene, the new miracle material, today commented further on it plans to develop graphene-based devices for cloud computing.
Graphene-based fiber optics components, such as photodetectors, fiber lasers and optical switches are expected to unclog the existing bottlenecks and enable ultrafast communication in data centers for Cloud computing.
The Problem
Fiber optics technology is the backbone of the Internet. With the observed and predicted explosive growth of Internet data -- as a result of Cloud-based services such as Netflix, Facebook, Google and many more -- the fundamental speed limits of current state-of-the-art fiber optic materials are being reached.
While signals can move at the speed of light down an optical fiber, the actual information that can be transmitted is limited by the detection speed of the photodetectors, which convert light signal into electrical signal for processing by computer chips.
Current state-of-the-art photodetectors are based on expensive rare and high power materials such as germanium, gallium, arsenic and indium, also known as III-V semiconductors. However, the fundamental physics of these materials limit them to a practical bandwidth of 25 Gbps (gigabits per second). New materials such as graphene must be explored in order to keep up with the speed of data movement in the Cloud.
The Solution
With a very high charge-carrier mobility and broad-spectrum optical response, the company's management team believes graphene-based components, such as photodetectors, fiber lasers and optical switches, will be able to overcome the speed limits of today's fiber optics technology. This will unleash a global era of high-resolution video on demand, high fidelity music streaming, high volume e-commerce and many more Cloud-based services. The first component the company is focused on is an ultrafast graphene photodetector.
Various research laboratories had proven that graphene is a very promising material for photodetectors and some have demonstrated detection speeds of 50 Gbps. The intrinsic optical bandwidth of graphene has also been measured to be in excess of 250 Gbps. This represents an increased transmission speed of 10 times more than the 25 Gbps limit in current state-of-the-art photodetectors.