Education for a Lifetime

Fiber-optic technology has revolutionized data communications by increasing bandwidth capacity. The invention of the erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), a tiny optical device enabling gigabytes of more data to be sent at faster speeds, is at the center of the data revolution. 

The inventor of the optical amplifier sought to figure out how to send more data in light pulses laser fired down thin strands of glass. Initially, information could travel 10 times further down fiber optic cable than copper wires without suffering signal degradation or loss, but it still was not enough capacity for the information age. 

The Zettabyte Era 

As a researcher at Southampton University in the mid-1980s, David Payne was part of one of several research teams across the globe scrambling to increase the capacity of optical communications systems. Researchers from U.S. Bell Labs and NTT in Japan were also working on ways to amplify light signals.

At that time, 15 gigabytes of global internet traffic was generated a month, which is the amount each of the world's 4.5 billion Internet users generates today (about 1.4 zettabytes). Including voice and all other forms of digital data, the world generates 40 zettabytes of data monthly.

Two key developments in fiber optics enabled the Zettabyte Era. In 1987, both  the teams at Southampton and Bell published papers on optical amplifiers. The erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) uses erbium ions as the gain medium to amplify the laser signal over multiple optical channels. At the time, underseas fiber optic cables had a transmission rate of 280 Mbit/s. By the 1990s, the speed had increased to 5 gigabytes per second.

A complementary development was the invention of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) by Ciena. DWDM allows many optical signals to be carried across one fiber on different wavelengths. Optical amplifiers and DWDM are deployed in most metro, long distance, and last mile communications networks today, as well in medical, display, instrumentation, sensors, and many other industries.

Fiber Optics for Yottabytes and Geobytes of Data

In 2008, the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize named three laureates for the invention of the EDFA—Emmanuel Desurvire of Bell Labs, Randy Giles of Bell Labs, and David Payne of Southampton University were each recognized as an inventor of the optical amplifier. These researchers continue to contribute cutting edge research applying advanced technologies (nanotechnologies, photonics) and materials to amplifiers, lasers, waveguides and other components of the high speed optical communications network.

As data usage in the Zettabyte Era grows, continuous advances in optical amplifiers will enable faster data processing for internet usage, IoT devices and more into the Yottabyte Era and beyond.

For more info on optical amplifiers, learn more about an inventor of optic amplifier.