Japanese Firm NTT Data Unveils Chip Which Will Assist In Communication Speed

NTT, a Japanese telecommunications company, unveiled a prototype chip on Thursday that it believes will help speed up communications in data centres and across undersea fibre optic cables in the future.

While the technology is still years away from commercialization, the tiny chip would amplify a 100 Gigahertz (GHz) electrical signal, according to Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT Research, Inc. in Silicon Valley. NTT claims that its development will speed up the Internet for consumers and data centres in the future.

Gomi added that amplifying the electrical signal is a key step in communications as a weak signal is hard to read. But the bigger the frequency, the harder it is to amplify because it requires a faster response time. A 100 GHz signal can be amplified in the lab setting, he said.

"That lab level achievement was implemented into a package that got very small. You can put it on your on your fingertip, basically. That Is that the key achievement," said Gomi.

He believes that shrinking the device size is critical to incorporating it into communication devices.

Gomi stated that the chip is made of a new material called indium phosphide rather than silicon.

This chip, he said, would be a critical component in reaching 2 terabit per second (Tbps) speeds. Today, fibre optic communications occur at around 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps), and the industry is already transitioning to 400 Gbps and aiming for 1.2 Tbps, according to him.

According to Gomi, a 2 Tbps communication future is still six to seven years away because communication equipment using the new chip would have to be designed by other companies.