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Telecom Business Review | Tuesday, May 23, 2023
The field of information technology provides many examples of the enabling role of optical technology. Often these enablers are small in size or cost but have an impact on a grand scale in large systems and applications.
FREMONT, CA: Data, internet, and broadband services are combining to create the information era rapidly due to supply and demand. In recent years, the information age has been referred to as the "tera era" because of the technological requirements for terabit-per-second information transfer and Tera operations per second computer processing. Substantial improvements in display technology are also required due to the expanding significance of image and video data. To meet this demand for information technology and enable the information era, optics and electronics are collaborating and complementing one another.
Optics currently play a significant role in five key technological areas and may do so in the future. One of them is the long-distance transmission of information across vast networks spanning continents, oceans, and local telephone and cable television networks. Optical fibre transmission is already the preferred method for this, easily outperforming rivals like coaxial cable or satellite communications in terms of price and performance. An alternative area in which international R&D seeks to create new markets is optical processing, which includes switching and networking. A third area is information storage, where technology must keep up with constantly growing demands for more and more storage space.
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A rapidly expanding complement to conventional magnetic storage is optical technology. The display of information is a fourth segment, and optics serves as the fundamental, unbreakable connection between the human eye and the electronics of a television or computer. The link between electronic equipment and information stored on paper, which includes printers, scanners, and copiers, is the fifth significant segment.
Many instances of the enabling function of optical technology can be found in the realm of information technology. These enablers frequently have a modest size or cost but a significant impact on huge systems and applications. A small semiconductor laser, for instance, permits the development of an optical transmitter, a transmission system, a telecommunications network, and the provision of information-age services like multimedia and the Internet. Another illustration is optical fibre, which makes it possible to build an optical cable, which makes it possible to build a network, and so on. The liquid crystal, which makes it possible for the flat-panel display and, consequently, the laptop computer, is a third example. The service revenues of telecommunications networks are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but component technologies like lasers or fibres are relatively inexpensive. As a result of these chains of enablers, it is difficult to assign precise monetary values to individual component technologies.
The chosen technique for long-distance information transmission is optics. The information superhighways' technology for transmitting speech, data, and video is based on semiconductor junction lasers and optical fibres. The key market categories include cable television networks, local telephone exchange linkages between the central office and the home, terrestrial long-distance telephone trunking between states and cities, and submarine transmission between continents.
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