OPTICAL NETWORKS
It's not just the pipes that need fixing. The traffic switches on the Internet backbone are kludgy electronic devices with limited bandwidth. Trellis Photonics (www.trellis-photonics.com), a Columbia, Maryland-based company, wants to replace them with a cheaper, faster, all-optical switching option dubbed electroholography.
Founded in 1999, Trellis was spun out of 10 years of research by Aharon Agranat, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The electroholographic switch he developed bounces light waves off holograms embedded in an array of crystals. This eliminates the need to convert data from photons to electrons and back again, as happens with the current leading optical technology. In microelectromechanical systems, tiny mirrors etched on chips flip back and forth in milliseconds.
Trellis says that by avoiding moving parts, it can produce switches for less than half the price that operate up to 10,000 times faster. And rapid switching means fewer backup systems, since some failures could be avoided in real time.
In a network controlled by lots of cheap and simple electroholographic devices, new channels could also be added to the fiber instantaneously, and each one can be regulated and monitored. "Today the network is built on a cast-in-concrete model," says CEO Timothy K. Cahall. "It's planned out over months and built over years. Electroholography overturns that paradigm."
Industry leader Enron Broadband will begin beta-testing electroholographic technology from Trellis in June, and the switches should be ready for general release by December. Trellis recently raised $25 million for new manufacturing plants in the US and Israel and is planning another round of financing.
Still, the notoriously risk-averse operators who run the optical backbone may be hard to win over. But Cahall isn't worried: Trellis' way, he boasts, is just plain better.
"This is a breakthrough technology," he says. "We want to make bandwidth instantly available."
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