Photonics is a key enabling technology that combines the features of optics and electronics. Photonics is also known as optoelectronics and has spawned advances such as lasers, fibre optics, advanced telecommunications, night-vision equipment, digital cameras and the digital video disk (DVD).
Photonics technology is associated with the generating, manipulating, transmitting and detecting of light. It is the control, manipulation, transfer and storage of information using light.
Copper is everywhere, giving it an advantage over optic fibre, but it has limited bandwidth and by using electrical signals is prone to interference. Optical fibres on the other hand, by using light is immune to interference. Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) allows different wavelengths of light to travel along the same fibre simultaneously, significantly increasing bandwidth. Optical fibres are already in use to transmit large capacities of data over long distances but at the moment the light gets changed back to electronic pulses for regular networks. The increasing demand for Internet, data services, video conferencing and other high bandwidth applications has put extra requirements on the existing and new optical fibre networks.
A single optical fibre is able to carry the equivalent of 300 million simultaneous telephone calls. It seems that this technology will enable sufficient capacity to meet the forecast demand for fully interactive, multimedia, Internet services.
The term photonics covers many areas of science and engineering, including :
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A nice site to go to is the Australian Photonics cooperative research centre.
Laboratory demonstrations of photonics are operating up to 80 Gbit/s per wavelength channel, which will lead to total capacities of a few Tbit/s.
2. How relevant does this writer think it is to networking?
This is very relevant to networking. Optic fibre is already in current use, but not everywhere due to the expense, but not because it isn't a good alternative to what we have today.
3. Is it truly an "emerging network technology" or upgrading?
Photonics is an emerging technology and therefore a fertile area for innovations. A recent OIDA (Optolectronics Industry Development Association) publication found that this technology was the subject of 25, 850 patents between 1996 and 2000, and 109,018 papers in scientific or technical periodicals.
4.What is the expected lifetime of Photonics?
The US Department of Commerce reports that the world photonics market will be valued at US$470 billion by the year 2013.
The Photonic Sector Campaign of Industry Canada predicts that 30% of existing electronic technology will be replaced by photonics.
It is predicted that photonic technology will not only increase the capacity of long distance communications, but will also be used for information transfer and processing for shorter distances and also for more complex networks, including LANs and ultimately inter-chip, or even intra-chip connections.
Photonics will be a technology in demand and will have a very long lifetime. At this stage it is difficult to say what the lifetime will actually be, as it has not nearly reached its full potential.
What is Photonics (2001, 2002), http://ep3.uwaterloo.ca/ep3/ep3what_is.html
What is Photonics (2002), http://www.oida.org/PTAP/whatis.html
Photonics Intstitute, (2001), What is Photonics (2002), http://www.photonics.edu.au/faq.html#photonics
Photonics Intstitute, (2001), Copper vs Fibre (2002), http://www.photonicsinstitute.com.au/explore/coppervsfibre.htm#
Centre for Electronic Materials and Devices, Newsletter (Autumn 2002), http://www.google.com.au/search?q=cache:W-3J7uHaWHcJ:www.ee.ic.ac.uk/ElecMatDev/newsletter5.pdf+%22fast+photonics%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
