BASF, as the commercial says, is a name
you might not know, but the company has worked on improving just
about everything from surf boards to biodegradable plastics. The
company is now looking to put its impressive research and development
powers to work on a project that may not necessarily revolutionize
optical transmission, but will sure do a heck of a lot of good for
it.
NewTon, as the project is named, is a
joint collaboration between BASF and several other research groups.
The aim of the project is develop a functional three dimensional
photonic crystal.
The major slowdown in
telecommunications currently isn't the transport materials, which are
largely optical fiber, but in the processing nodes where information
is routed. There is presently no inexpensive and efficient means of
making the entire process optical, and the signals must be converted
to electrical so the routing hardware can deal with it.
While the speed of light is the speed
of light, and electricity generally obeys the speed limit, the
advantage to optical transmission is that one fiber can contain much
more information than a strand of copper. This is done in the form of
varying wavelengths. The idea behind NewTon is to make photonic
crystals that can separate these different colors from the white
light and route them in a generally productive and accurate manner
while being cost efficient to produce.
They crystals are produced using
aqueous dispersion, something BASF knows quite a bit about. A crystal
lattice is formed using polymers, then the lattice is filled with
silicon. The polymers are then burned out, producing a mirror image
of the original crystal. Defects will then be created in the
structure which act as the
photoconducter, steering the separated wavelengths to where they are
needed.
"A structured three-dimensional
photonic crystal could be the key component for a compact optical
semiconductor or even for an all-optical routing processor.
Converting optical signals into electrical signals would then be
superfluous," says Dr. Reinhold J. Leyrer, BASF's project leader in
its Polymer Research division.
Eliminating the electrical part of the
equation from traffic routing could be quite a boon for
telecommunications companies, allowing much more efficient use of
their available bandwidth. It could also lead to a faster, less
congested internet for everyone, perhaps alleviating some of the need
for providers to throttle or traffic shape data.
