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VEGA powers KIT's new world record!

KIT researchers transfer 26 Terabits in one second with the VEGA DAC

For nearly two decades, Micram UltraFastSiGe™ technology has consistently delivered spectacular performance years ahead of its time, enabling visionary developers to push the limits of data transmission speed and bandwidth. In May researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology announced a new world record of 26 Tbit/s (the equivalent of 700 DVDs per second) over a single wavelength on a 50 kilometer-long strand of optical fiber, using a single laser beam. The Micram VEGA DAC, with its phenomenal performance and unique high speed FPGA interface, was a critical part of this historic effort by KIT.
 
Papers detailing KIT’s achievements with Micram VEGA are now available. In their latest paper, KIT researchers describe their VEGA-powered real-time OFDM transmitter operating at greater than 100 Gbit/s.
Electrical Real-Time Transmitter 
The electrical transmitter used in the experiment was built with 2 VEGA DACs as shown above.
 
"Real-time OFDM transmitters breaking the 100 Gbit/s barrier require high-performance, usually FPGA-based digital signal processing. Especially the Fourier transform as a key operation of any OFDM system must be optimized with respect to performance and chip area utilization. Here, an alternative to the widely adopted fast Fourier transform algorithm is demonstrated. Based on an extensive yet optimized use of pre-set look-up tables, the FPGA implementation supports fast reconfigurable channel equalization and switching times in the nanosecond range without re-loading any code. The potential of the concept by realizing the first real-time single polarization OFDM transmitter generating a 101.5 Gbit/s data stream by modulating 58 subcarriers with 16QAM is shown."

Many other technical papers on VEGA-powered research can be found through Micram's literature page.
 
KIT’s optical research team includes Professor Jürg Leuthold, David Hillerkuß, René Schmogrow, and Professors Wolfgang Freude and Christian Koos.
 
Other companies and institutions involved in KIT’s research were Agilent, Time-Bandwidth, Finisar, and the University of Southampton.
 
Learn more about Micram VEGA here.