A cable as thin as a hair can achieve a bandwidth of 105 Gb / s.
Researchers are looking to replace the copper fiber inside existing USB cables with a polymeric material. This new generation cable can improve much higher data transfer rates.
Copper is commonly used in USB and HDMI cables for data transmission. But it also takes a lot of energy to transfer data at higher speeds. “There is a fundamental relationship between the energy burned and the rate of data transmission,” said MIT alumnus Jack Holloway and lead author of the study.
Although these copper fibers can be replaced by optical fiber cables, this poses other problems. Because silicon chips have a lot of difficulty processing photons, it is more difficult to optimize the connection between the cable and the computer.
According to Jack Holloway, there are many alternative methods, but they are both complex and expensive. The researchers therefore created their own cable using polymer plastic fibers. The new cables are not only easier to manufacture, lower cost, but also increase data transfer rates several times.
Polymer fibers can transmit data at high speed, without consuming as much energy as copper. Researchers believe that polymer fiber may be close to the efficiency level of fiber optic cable, but more importantly, it is easily compatible with silicon chips in computers.
