· Ioana Cozmuța · Papers · 1 min read
Building Blocks of a Robust Economy in Earth`s Orbit
The Machinery of Commercialization
Abstract
Materials power key technological advancements in areas such as communications, consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive and energy. Silica has become the status quo because of its abundance and affordability. Advances in areas such as quantum computing, AI and IoT will require new materials with performance envelope beyond the traditional (i.e. global interne data is rapidly growing beyond petabytes/s/km). A long-time competitor to silica, heavy metal fluoride glasses represent an attractive candidate due to their optical transmission window that extends deep into the infrared (IR) and recently also in the UV (200nm-800nm). Although ZBLAN was the early frontrunner for 2.5pm transatlantic links with no repeaters, silica won the race in the 1980’s, due to the development of repeaters at 1.5pm. Today this reliance on silica is hurting the industry by forcing retrofitting of new applications. It is becoming clear that the demands of the next generation of communications cannot be solved with additional investments in a silica-based infrastructure. Silica has now maxed out also its affordability not just its signal transmission capacity. An equivalent…
