Tag Archives: University College London

Technology Shorts October 2026

Today’s blog looks at some technology breakthroughs that may have long-term impact on the broadband industry.

First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip. IBM announced a new chip in June that packs almost 100 billion transistors in a chip the size of a fingernail. IBM’s new chip is a landmark moment in computing and pushes transistor technology beyond the nanometer era to the scale of atoms. The new chip features a transistor architecture of 0.7 nanometers (or 7 angstroms). The company says the new chip, with dimensions of 10 millimeters by 15 millimeters is 70% more energy efficient, and has a 50% improvement in performance over the industry’s best current chips. The company predicts the new chip technology will become standard in commercial devices within a decade.

To create the new chip, IBM researchers developed an entirely new transistor architecture they call the nanostack. The nanostack design vertically stacks and staggers transistors, taking advantage of 3D sequential integration to pack more transistors onto a chip. The design also unlocks the use of different material combinations within each stacked layer, optimizing performance and power efficiency of each transistor independent of the other.

New Record Fiber Speed. Researchers at University College London (UCL) set a new fiber optics record by transmitting a signal at 450 terabits per second. The work was carried out in partnership with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. The team sent a data transmission from the UCL Roberts Building in Bloomsbury, London, to the Telehouse North data center near Canary Wharf in London, and back for a round-trip distance of 24 miles.

The fast speed was accomplished by expanding the light frequencies being used. Fiber optics technology uses the C-Band of infrared light between 1530 and 1565 nanometers, and the L-Band between 1565 and 1625 nanometers. These two bands contain 134 and 163 potential separate channels, respectively.

The researchers used additional frequency bands of data transmission to include O-Band (1260 to 1360 nm), the E-Band (1360 to 1460 nm), and the S-Band (1460 to 1530 nm). This added over 1,000 additional light channels.

Light-Powered Chip. Scientists at Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy, in Melbourne, Australia, have created a tiny new circuit for use in quantum computing that can generate, direct, and read information carried by light, all within a single chip. The teams findings, led by Dr. Chi Li, were published in Nature Photonics. The new device relies on ultra-thin materials that are only a few atoms thick. The materials are paired with specially engineered nanostructures designed to precisely control light at extremely small scales. One of the most important aspects of the technology is that it operates at room temperature, while most quantum systems require extremely cold environments.

This new chip is a milestone in the growing area of research known as “valleytronics”. The new chip produces specialized light signals and steers the light along specific paths before converting to electrical signals. The light signals store information using a quantum property called the “valley degree of freedom.” Scientists believe the unique characteristic of the system could provide entirely new ways to encode, transmit, and process data. It could be the basis for breakthroughs in faster computing and lower energy consumption.

WiFi Identification. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute of Information Security and Dependability have been able to use the signals from a standard WiFi router to identify people and map their surroundings without relying on cameras or requiring the person being observed to carry a connected device. They’ve found a way to observe the propagation of radio waves to create an image of objects in the environment, basically using radio waves in the same way that a camera uses light waves.

Earlier approaches to sensing people through wireless signals relied on specialized equipment and complex measurements involving reflected signals. The new technique does not require any specialized hardware and works with off-the-shelf WiFi. The researchers were instantly alarmed at the potential misuse of the technology by unscrupulous corporations or authoritarian governments. They are calling for protective measures and privacy safeguards to be incorporated into the forthcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard.

Advancing the Speed of Wireless

Scientists at University College London recently achieved a speed on a wireless link of 938 Gbps. That’s over 4,000 times faster than the current average speed being delivered by T-Mobile, the current fastest cellular provider in the U.S.

The team is researching techniques for multiplexing multiple radio transmissions into a coherent transmission. The scientists achieved the speeds by utilizing a huge span of spectrum between 5GHz and 150 GHz. They also had to combine multiple techniques to create and join the signals.

  • The signals from 5-75 GHz were generated using traditional, but high-quality radios that used digital-to-analog converters.
  • The signals from the higher frequencies, the W-band from 75-110 GHz and the D-band from 110-150 GHz were generated by mixing optically modulated signals that used frequency-locked lasers and high-speed photodiodes. By frequency-locking the lasers, the scientists were able to create a stable carrier frequency that avoided the signal noise that would have been generated by normal free-running lasers.
  • The team then used orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM)and bit loading to goose the signal up to 938 Gbps over the air.

Another team of researchers recently achieved fast wireless speeds on a single channel. The team is a consortium of researchers from the Japanese firms DOCOMO, NIT Corporation, NEC Corporation, and Fujitsu. The team of companies created a wireless device that uses 100 GHz spectrum indoors or 300 GHz spectrum outdoors to create a 100 Gbps link that can transmit for about 100 meters. The companies see this first device as the prototype for developing future wireless radios that can deliver speeds only possible today on fiber.

In the past, several research teams in laboratories have created terabit speeds for a link of several feet. There is a lot of literature speculating that radios in space could reliably achieve terabit speeds between satellites without the interference created by air.

All of the research teams are pushing the cutting edge for wireless technologies with the goal of someday creating much faster wireless technology. The worldwide push to master the use of the terahertz frequencies between 100 GHz and 1 THz has been labeled as 6G, although wireless vendors have already absconded that label to describe radios that use millimeter wave spectrum. The terahertz frequencies lie between traditional radio and infrared light.

The first 6G summit met in 2022 in Levi, Lapland, Finland, sponsored by the University of Oulu, and included major wireless vendors like Nokia, Huawei, Ericsson, Samsung, and NTT, along with researchers from numerous universities as well as groups like Bell Labs. At the summit, researchers talked about creating a set of standards for terahertz frequencies by 2030. They identified the first hurdle as the development of chips that can handle faster speeds. There were also questions about whether governments would try to regulate the higher frequencies.

For now, these fast tests represent scientists pushing the edge of radio technology. These tests are not going to produce any usable technology for many years. The University of College London used a wide swath of spectrum that would never by allowed by any government. But the early success of these various tests show that faster radios will somebody be possible.

A New Fiber Optic Speed Record

Researchers at University College London (UCL) have set a new bandwidth record for fiber optic bandwidth transmission. They’ve been able to communicate through a fiber optic cable at over 178 terabits per second, or 178,000 gigabits per second. The research was done in collaboration with fiber optic firms Xtera and KDDI Research. The press release of the achieved speed claims this is 20% faster than the previously highest achieved speed.

The achieved speed has almost reached the Shannon limit, which defines the maximum amount of error-free data that can be sent over a communications channel. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the announcement was that UCL scientists achieved this speed over existing fiber optic cables and didn’t use pristine fiber installed in a laboratory.

The fast signal throughput was achieved by combining several techniques. First, the lasers use raman amplification, which involves injecting photons of lower energy into a high-frequency photon stream. This produces predictable photon scattering which can be tailored to the characteristics needed for optimally traveling through glass fiber.

The researchers also used Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. To those who have forgotten the periodic table, erbium is a commonly found metal in nature with an atomic weight of 68. Erbium has a key characteristic needed for fiber optic amplifiers in that the metal efficiently amplifies light in the wavelengths used by fiber optic lasers.

Finally, the amplifiers used for the fast speeds used semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA). These are diodes that have been treated with anti-reflection coatings so that the laser light signal can pass through with the least amount of scattering. The net result of all of these techniques is that the scientists were able to reduce the amount of light that is scattered during the transmission though a glass fiber cable, thus maximizing data throughput.

UCL also used a wider range of wavelengths than are normally used in fiber optics. Most fiber optic transmission technologies create empty buffers around each light bandwidth being used (much like we do with radio transmissions). The UCL scientists used all of the spectrum, without separation bands, and used several techniques to minimize interference between bands of light.

This short description of the technology being used is not meant to intimidate a non-technical reader, but rather show the level of complexity in today’s fiber optic technology. It’s a technology that we all take for granted, but which is far more complex than most people realize. Fiber optic technology might be the most lab-driven technology in daily use since the technology came from research labs and scientists have been steadily improving the technology for decades.

We’re not going to see multi-terabit lasers in regular use in our networks anytime soon, and that’s not the purpose of this kind of research. UCL says that the most immediate benefit of their research is that they can use some of these same techniques to improve the efficiency of existing fiber repeaters.

Depending upon the kind of glass being used and the spectrum utilized, current long-haul fiber technology requires having the signals amplified every 25 to 60 miles. That means a lot of amplifiers are needed for long-haul fiber routes between cities. Without amplification, the laser light signals get scattered to the point where they can’t be interpreted at the receiving end of the light transmission. As implied by their name, amplifiers boost the power of light signals, but their more important function is to reorder the light signals into the right format to keep the signal coherent.

Each amplification site adds to the latency in long-haul fiber routes since fibers must be spliced into amplifiers and passed through the amplifier electronics. The amplification process also introduces errors into the data stream, meaning some data has to be sent a second time. Each amplifier site must also be in powered and housed in a cooled hut or building. Reducing the number of amplifier sites would reduce the cost and the power requirement and increase the efficiency of long-haul fiber.

New Technology – Telecom and Computing Breakthroughs

The InternetToday I look at some breakthroughs that will result in better fiber networks and faster computers – all components needed to help our networks be faster and more efficient.

Increasing Fiber Capacity. A study from Bell Labs suggests that existing fiber networks could be made 40% more efficient by changing to IP transit routing. Today operators divvy up networks into discrete components. For example, the capacity on a given route may be segmented into distinct dedicated 100 Gig paths that are then used for various discrete purposes. This takes the available bandwidth on a given long-haul fiber and breaks it into pieces, much in the same manner as was done in the past with TDM technology to break data into T1s and DS3s.

The Bell Lab study suggests a significant improvement if the entire bandwidth on a given fiber is treated as one huge data pipe, much in the same manner as might be done with the WAN inside of a large business. This makes sense because there is always spare or unused capacity on each segment of the fiber’s bandwidth and putting it all together into one large pipe makes the spare capacity available. Currently Alcatel Lucent, Telefonica, and Deutsche Telekom are working on gear that will enable the concept.

Reducing Interference on Fiber. Researchers at University College London have developed a new set of techniques that reduce interference between different light wave frequencies on fiber. It is the accumulation of interference that requires optical repeaters to be placed on networks to refresh optical signals.

The research team took a fresh approach to how signals are generated onto fiber and pass the optical signals through a comb generator to create seven equidistantly-spaced and frequency-locked signals, each in the form of a 16 QAM super-channel. This reduces the number of different light signals on the fiber to these seven channels which drastically reduces the interference.

The results were spectacular and they were able to generate a signal that could travel without re-amplification for 5,890 kilometers, or 3,660 miles. This has immediate benefit for undersea cables since finding ways to repeat these signals is costly. But there are applications beyond long-haul fiber and the team is now looking at ways to use the dense super-channels for cable TV systems, cable modems, and Ethernet connections.

Faster Computer Chips. A research team at MIT has found a way to make multicore chips faster. Multicore chips contain more than one processor and are used today for intense computing needs in places like data centers and in supercomputers.

The improvement comes through the creation of a new scheduling technique they are calling CDCS (computation and data co-scheduling). This technique is a way to more efficiently distribute data flow and the timing of computations on the chips. The new algorithm they have developed allows data to be placed near to where calculations are performed, reducing the movement of data within the chip. This results in a 46% increase in computing capacity while also reducing power consumption by 36%. Consequently, this will reduce the need for cooling which is becoming a major concern and one of the biggest costs at data centers.

Faster Cellphones. Researchers at the University of Texas have found a way to double the speed at which cellphones and other wireless devices can send or receive data. The circuit they have developed will let the cellphone radio deploy in ‘full-duplex’ mode, meaning that the radio can make both send and receive signals at the same time.

Today a cellphone radio can do one or the other and your phone’s radio constantly flips between sending or receiving data. Radios have always done this so that the frequencies from the transmitting part of the phone, which are normally the stronger of the two signals, don’t interfere with and drown out the incoming signals.

The new circuit, which they are calling a circulator, can isolate the incoming and outgoing signals and acts as a filter to keep the two separate. Circulators have been is use for a long time in devices like radar, but they have required large, bulky magnets made from expensive rare earth metals. But the new circulator devised by the team does this same function using standard chip components.

This circulator is a tiny standalone device that can be added to any radio chip and it acts like a traffic manager to monitor and control the incoming and outgoing signals. This simple, new component is perfect for cellphones, but will benefit any two-way radio, such as WiFi routers. Since a lot of the power used in a cellphone goes to flipping between send and receive mode, this new technology ought to also provide a significant improvement to battery life.

Million-Fold Increase in Hard Drive Capacity? Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory have developed a way to magnetize graphene, and this could lead to data storage devices with a million-time increase in storage per size of the device. Graphene is a 1-atom thick sheet of carbon which can be layered to make multi-dimensional stacked chips.

The scientists have been able to magnetize the graphene by sitting it on a layer of silicon and submerging it in a pool of cryogenic ammonia and lithium for about a minute. They then introduce hydrogen, which renders the graphene electromagnetic. The process is adjustable, and with an electron beam you can shave off hydrogen atoms and effectively write on the graphene chip. Today we already have terabyte flash drives. Anybody have a need for an exabyte flash drive?