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Optical computing could benefit from new 'whispering gallery' fiber
It's a spooky feature of Grand Central Station that if you whisper something against the wall, your voice can resonate around the perimeter of the building and sneak up on you from behind. The same 'whispering gallery' principle is crucial to next-gen optical computing: light signals have to be sent on extremely circuitous journeys through 'microresonators', which temporarily bottle up the beams and thereby serve as memory. So far, microresonators have generally been made from silicon wafers etched with the a long series of loops. However, even the most precise etching leaves imperfections, which quickly cause the signal to lose its strength and fade away. Now, researchers at OFS Laboratories in Somerset, N. J., have come up with a different type of microresonator that could potentially hold onto light 100 times longer. The new technology diverts light onto a stretch of optic fiber that has been specially manufactured with tiny step-changes in its diameter. When the signal hits this abrupt change, it reverses and goes back the opposite way -- and, if it hits another diameter change, it will effectively enter a whispering gallery inside the fiber, bouncing up and down with only minor attenuation. The OFS scientists claim their microresonator could appear in "specialized devices" in just two or three years, which is good to hear, because electronics is starting to get old.
Alcatel-Lucent plants two flags in Latin American soil: LTE and 100Gb/s cable
Not content with newly arrived iTunes and Netflix, Latin America's growing population of web aficionados are seeing some major investment in high-speed internet services too. Alcatel-Lucent says it's won contracts to provide infrastructure for the region's first LTE network -- in Uruguay, to be precise -- as well as the first 100Gb/s optical cable network, which will soon be streaming telenovelas across Argentina. Welcome to the revolution, compañeros, and read on for the full PR.
