The breakthrough was made by Asbjørn Arvad Jørgensen at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen along with an international team comprising Danish, Swedish and Japanese researchers.
The team used a photonic chip – a technology that permits optical components to be built onto computer chips. The chip divided a stream of data into thousands of separate channels that were transferred via fiber optics.
The stream was split into 37 sections for each fiber optic cable core, with the sections split into 223 data chunks in the electro-magnetic spectrum.
The data chunks were then transmitted all at once over 7.9 kilometers without interfering with each other.
“You could say the average internet traffic in the world is about a petabit per second. What we transmit is two times that,” Jørgensen told the New Scientist. “It’s an incredibly large amount of data that we’re sending through, essentially, less than a square millimeter [of cable]. It just goes to show that we can go so much further than we are today with internet connections.”
While the transfer rate achieved by Jørgensen and his team is not as fast as data transfer rates of 10.66 petabits per second that are currently possible, the real breakthrough in the research is in the miniaturization that was achieved.
Jørgensen believes that they can improve on the current setup and create an even smaller on-chip design about the size of a matchbox by shrinking the equipment down to the silicon level.