Team moves towards all-fibre optical comms network

A team from Southampton and Penn State Universities created a doped semiconductor junction in a microstructured optical fibre, enabling photodetection at high bandwidth.

‘This junction has a far higher performance than any electronic device ever integrated into a fibre before,’ Prof John Badding at Penn told The Engineer.

Fibre-optic cables are the backbone of internet and telephone communications worldwide. However, all these lines require external electronic devices to generate, amplify, receive and manipulate data.

Normally this is done with optical-electronic-optical (OEO) conversion, that in its entirety is expensive, complicated and uses large amounts of energy.

‘Coupling chips and fibres is often problematic… the size of a conventional fibre core is around 100 times smaller than a silicon waveguide,’ Badding explained.

In 2006, the UK-US team demonstrated a new optical fibre platform that could potentially handle electronics functions, as well as transmission, using a technique called chemical vapour deposition (CVD). It essentially involves creating specially fabricated pores in the optical fibres and putting down layers of semiconducting material.