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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Monday, June 27, 2022
The information industry, including the services it provides, is growing rapidly worldwide. Its annual revenue is estimated to exceed $1 trillion.
FREMONT, CA: The demand for enhanced information services, such as data, Internet, and broadband, along with the supply of innovative information technology, has propelled us into a new age of information. Often referred to as the "tera era," the information age is characterized by terabits of information per second information transmission, Tera operations per second computer processing power, and terabytes of data storage. Strong improvements in display technology are also required due to the expanding significance of image and video data. To address this demand for information technology and enable the information era, optics and electronics are collaborating and complementing one another.
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Optics currently plays a significant role in five key technological areas or has the potential to do so soon. One is the long-distance transmission of information across vast networks spanning continents, oceans, and local telephone and cable television networks. With a clear cost and performance advantage over rival technologies like coaxial cable or satellite communications, optical fibre transmission is already the method of choice for this. Another area where international R&D seeks to create new markets is optical processing, which includes switching and networking. A third phase is information storage, where technology must keep up with constantly growing demands for more and more storage space. A rapidly expanding complement to conventional magnetic storage is optical technology. The display of information is the 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.
Numerous 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 the 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 the third instance. Components like lasers or fibres are generally inexpensive, but the service revenues of telecommunications networks are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, making it difficult to assign precise monetary values to specific component technologies due to these chains of enablers.
The favoured technique for long-distance information transmission is optics. The information superhighways' technology for transmitting speech, data, and video are 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. Satellite communications also present intriguing opportunities.
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