Dale’s Web Log

Corning Incorporated today announced the development of a new optical fiber-based technology that solves an historic technical challenge for telecommunications carriers installing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks.

Corning’s breakthrough is based on a nanoStructures™ optical fiber design that allows the cabled fiber to be bent around very tight corners with virtually no signal loss. These improved attributes will enable telecommunications carriers to economically offer true high-speed Internet, voice and HDTV services to virtually all commercial and residential (apartment and condominium) buildings. Current optical fiber installations lose signal strength and effectiveness when bent around corners and routed through a building, making it difficult and expensive to run fiber all the way to customers’ homes.

“This is a game-changing technology for telecommunications applications,” said Peter F. Volanakis, president and chief operating officer at Corning. “We have developed an optical fiber cable that is as rugged as copper cable but with all of the bandwidth benefits of fiber. By making fundamental changes in the way light travels in the fiber, we were able to create a new optical fiber that is over 100 times more bendable than standard fibers.” Corning’s newest fiber technology achieves this while maintaining compatibility with industry performance standards, existing manufacturing processes and installation procedures. “So, customers don’t have to sacrifice one benefit to get another,” he said.

“There are more than 680 million apartment homes worldwide, including more than 25 million in the United States. The high cost of installation and difficulty in delivering fiber to the home made this market unappealing to most providers. We have been working closely with these carriers to create a solution that will make this more economically viable for them and for their customers,” he said.

One of the early proponents of this emerging technology was Verizon Communications Inc. In February of this year, Corning and Verizon commissioned a joint working team to solve the problems of multiple dwelling unit installation using this new fiber solution. “Continued innovation in advanced telecommunications networks is critical to the long-term success of Verizon and our ability to provide our FiOS service on a mass scale in the United States,” said Paul Lacouture, executive vice president of Engineering and Technology, Verizon Telecom Group. “We are working closely with Corning to solve the challenges of providing fiber solutions to high-rise apartment complexes across the United States. This fiber technology will enable us to bring faster Internet speeds, higher-quality high-definition content, and more interactive capabilities than any other platform which exists today.”

Corning first introduced low-loss optical fiber in the early 1970s. Optical fibers are waveguides that transmit light within the fiber’s central region, or core. However, with standard single-mode fiber, tight bends cause leakage of the light, resulting in signal loss or optical power degradation. A bend or curve that is too tight will result in total signal loss. With Corning’s new nanoStructures design, the optical fiber maintains its signal strength when bent or curved, with performance results 100 times better than standard single-mode fibers. The new fiber also enables simpler and more aesthetically pleasing designs for the cable, hardware and equipment used in the deployment.

Corning will introduce a full suite of optical fiber, cable and hardware and equipment solutions based on its nanoStructures technology platform this fall at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Orlando, Fla., Sept. 30 – Oct. 4.

After months of internal squabbling, members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) have finally agreed on a path to the next standard for high-speed Ethernet.

At a meeting last week, HSSG members approved the project authorization request (PAR) and the IEEE’s “five criteria” required for the study group to continue working on a new Ethernet standard that will include both 40Gbps and 100Gbps rates.

The agreement comes after six months of internal debates over whether the next standard should include a 40Gbps line rate, and a full year after the study group was founded.

The new standard will provide physical layer (PHY) specifications to support 40Gbps operation over at least 100 meters of multimode fiber, at least 10 meters of copper, and at least 1 meter over a backplane.

On the 100Gbps side, the standard will address distances of at least 10 km and 40 km on singlemode fiber; at least 100 km on multimode fiber; and at least 10 meters over copper.

The HSSG was formed to define the next Ethernet standard for network aggregation, and it seemed well on its way to advancing a 100Gbps proposal late last year.

But in January some members of the group, led by server and storage vendors such as Sun Microsystems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., and Brocade Communications Systems Inc., began pushing for a standard that included a 40Gbps rate for data-center applications.

A number of switching and routing vendors, including Cisco Systems Inc., rejected that idea, citing possible delays in the commercialization of 100-Gigabit Ethernet aggregation products, as well as the higher costs involved in developing and manufacturing products that comply with a dual 40- and 100Gbps standard.

In the end, the group was able to secure a large enough majority to adopt the proposal for a dual standard. In the five-criteria document, the HSSG noted that “bandwidth requirements for computing and core networking applications are growing at different rates, which necessitates the definition of two distinct data rates for the next generation of Ethernet networks.”

Specifically, a majority in the group decided that 40Gbps provided “the best balance of performance and cost” for servers and computing applications, while 100Gbps was the better speed for aggregation and core networks.

On the HSSG email reflector on Friday, study group chair and Force10 Networks Inc. components scientist John D’Ambrosia wrote that the IEEE 802.3 Executive Committee had approved the pre-submission of the group’s PAR to the New Standards Committee (Nescom) for consideration at the December 2007 Standards Association Standards Board (SASB) meeting, and that it would remain on the agenda subject to Executive Committee approval at the November meeting.

D’Ambrosia also noted that the Executive Committee had approved an extension of the HSSG, allowing it to continue working on defining the standard.

Brad Booth, president of The Ethernet Alliance , says that, despite the internal debates, he doesn’t expect much delay in the standardization process. “I would expect formal ratification sometime in 2010,” he says. “The real technical meat of the work can start, and has already. We’ve seen presentations that are very technical in nature, so we may have a first draft by next summer, which would put us in line with where we hope to be”

— Ryan Lawler, Reporter, Light Reading

North Carolina State University physicists have recently deduced a way to improve high-energy-density capacitors so that they can store up to seven times as much energy per unit volume than the common capacitor. High performance capacitors would enable hybrid and electric cars with much greater acceleration, better and faster steering of rockets and spacecraft, better regeneration of electricity when using brakes in electric cars, and improved lasers, among many other electrical applications.

A capacitor is an energy storage device. Electrical energy is stored by a difference in charge between two metal surfaces. Unlike a battery, capacitors are designed to release their energy very quickly. They are used in electric power systems, hybrid cars, and all kinds of electronics.

The amount of energy that a capacitor can store depends on the insulating material in between the metal surfaces, called a dielectric. A polymer called PVDF has interested physicists as a possible high-performance dielectric. It exists in two forms, polarized or unpolarized. In either case, its structure is mostly frozen-in and changes only slightly when a capacitor is charged up. Mixing a second polymer called CTFE with PVDF results in a material with regions that can change their structure, enabling it to store and release unprecedented amounts of energy.

The team, led by Vivek Ranjan, concluded that a more ordered arrangement of the material inside the capacitor could further increase the energy storage of new high-performance capacitors, which already store energy four times more densely than capacitors used in industry. Their predictions of higher energy density capacitors are encouraging, but have yet to be experimentally tested.