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Multimode Waveguide Grating Coupler
Inventors
Prof. TSANG Hon Ki
Department
Department of Electronic Engineering
Key Problem and Market Opportunity
- Internet traffic growth continues on exponential curve, >90% internet traffic served by data centers
- Data center traffic volumes already >4 times larger than external internet traffic
- 400 Gigabit ethernet will be insufficient to cope with expected traffic in 5-10 years
- Need new technologies to enable cost effective introduction of 4Tb/s optical interconnects
- Current market size for optical transceivers is about USD 6 billion and growing at 10% per year
Key Advantages of the Technology
- New multimode waveguide grating coupler can enable use of mode division multiplexing in multimode fiber using different modes for different data channels, with the multimode fiber interfaced directly to the silicon chip
- Can potentially reduce cost of transceivers by reducing the number of wavelengths and number of lasers needed for scaling to 4Tb/s interconnect
- By using the different spatial modes at the same wavelength, the transmission capacity can be multiplied by the number of modes in the fiber
- Technology is compatible with industry standard multimode fibers
Photos
Schematic diagrams of a multimode waveguide grating for simultaneous selective launching of 4 data channels into a multimode fiber with depictions of the (a) LP01-x mode, (b) LP01-y mode, (c) LP11-x mode and (d) LP11-y mode.
Multimode Waveguide Grating Coupler
Inventors
Prof. TSANG Hon Ki
Department
Department of Electronic Engineering
Key Problem and Market Opportunity
- Internet traffic growth continues on exponential curve, >90% internet traffic served by data centers
- Data center traffic volumes already >4 times larger than external internet traffic
- 400 Gigabit ethernet will be insufficient to cope with expected traffic in 5-10 years
- Need new technologies to enable cost effective introduction of 4Tb/s optical interconnects
- Current market size for optical transceivers is about USD 6 billion and growing at 10% per year
Key Advantages of the Technology
- New multimode waveguide grating coupler can enable use of mode division multiplexing in multimode fiber using different modes for different data channels, with the multimode fiber interfaced directly to the silicon chip
- Can potentially reduce cost of transceivers by reducing the number of wavelengths and number of lasers needed for scaling to 4Tb/s interconnect
- By using the different spatial modes at the same wavelength, the transmission capacity can be multiplied by the number of modes in the fiber
- Technology is compatible with industry standard multimode fibers
Potential Applications
- Data Center interconnects and optical communications
- Multimode imaging
Photos
Schematic diagrams of a multimode waveguide grating for simultaneous selective launching of 4 data channels into a multimode fiber with depictions of the (a) LP01-x mode, (b) LP01-y mode, (c) LP11-x mode and (d) LP11-y mode.
Categories
Information and Communications Technology
CUHK Tech ID
P-2019-0886
Patents
US16/844137
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