A new high-speed telecommunications chip could replace the power-hungry, expensive and bulky equipment that currently resides at the core of the internet.
The internet uses high-speed signals that exploit the coherence of light to transmit information. Until now it has only been possible to accurately measure the intensity and phase of optical pulses with bulky and expensive laboratory equipment.
The energy-efficient SPIDER chip (Spectral Phase Interferometry for Direct Electric-Field Reconstruction) could give all parts of the internet the ability to measure signals in which the phase of light is used to encode information.
Read more at University of Sydney