CLIFFNOTES FROM ARTICLE

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>A single chip has managed to transfer over a petabit-per-second by a team of scientists from universities in Denmark, Sweden, and Japan. That's over one million gigabits of data per second over a fibre optic cable, or basically the entire internet's worth of traffic.
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>The researchers—A. A. Jørgensen, D. Kong, L. K. Oxenløwe—and their team successfully showed a data transmission of 1.84 petabits over a 7.9km fibre cable using just a single chip. That's not quite as fast as some other alternatives with larger, bulkier systems, which have reached up to 10.66 petabits, but the key here is scale: the proposed system is very compact.
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>By splitting a data stream into 37 sections, one for each core of a fibre optic cable, and then further splitting each of those streams into 223 channels, the researchers were able to remove a great deal of interference that slows down optical systems and therefore deliver an internet's worth of data transmission using a single chip.
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>The researchers also theorise that such a system could support speeds of up to 100 petabits-per-second in massively parallel systems.
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>Essentially, high-speed data transmission that often requires a fibre optic cable and bulky equipment is now being miniaturised into a smaller on-chip package. Instead of multiple lasers in parallel, which come with their own set of challenges, it's possible to shrink a good deal of this equipment to the silicon level. And with that even remove some of the difficulties in sending massive data packages long distances and at high speeds.
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>A big part of these new breakthroughs are microcombs, which are a way of generating constant and measurable frequencies of light.