Your home Wi-Fi runs at roughly one gigabit per second on a good day. A new photonic chip demonstrated in a Nature paper can send 400 gigabits per second through the air wirelessly, and broadcast 86 separate 8K video streams simultaneously while doing it.
There is a gap at the heart of every modern communications network. Fibre-optic cables carry data at enormous speeds through the ground, but at some point the signal has to leave the cable and travel through the air to reach a device. That transition — from fibre to wireless — has always involved a loss of speed. The two technologies evolved separately, with different signal designs and different hardware, and converting between them wastes bandwidth and adds noise at every step.
A team of researchers from Peking University, ShanghaiTech, Peng Cheng Laboratory, and the National Optoelectronics Innovation Centre has built a single photonic chip that ends this bottleneck.
Published in Nature, the work demonstrates wireless transmission at 400 gigabits per second, which the researchers describe as a world first at this data rate. To show what 400 Gbps actually means in practice, the same chip simultaneously broadcast 86 separate channels of real-time 8K video wirelessly. The system operates across the frequency range from 138 to 223 gigahertz, deep in the sub-terahertz band being planned as a backbone for 6G networks.
The core of the system is a thin-film lithium niobate chip, a material that has become one of the most promising platforms in photonic engineering because of how efficiently it converts between optical and electrical signals.
The chip contains two key devices: a modulator that converts the electrical data signal into an optical one, and a photodiode that converts the optical signal into the terahertz wireless signal that travels through the air. Both devices have a bandwidth exceeding 250 gigahertz, which is what allows the system to carry data at rates that previous hybrid fibre-wireless architectures could not reach.
The reason this matters is not just the speed. It is the architecture.
Every existing high-speed wireless system requires dedicated hardware to convert signals between the fibre and wireless domains, including frequency mixers, local oscillators, and amplifiers specific to the target frequency band.
Each piece of hardware is designed for a narrow frequency range, which means changing the wireless frequency requires changing the hardware. The new system eliminates this problem. Because the conversion from fibre to wireless happens in the optical domain rather than the electronic domain, the same chip can operate across a wide range of frequencies without hardware changes, simply by adjusting the optical carrier.
The team also demonstrated 512 gigabits per second over a short-reach fibre link using the same devices, which means the same chip handles both the wired and wireless portions of a communication network with a consistent set of hardware.
This matters because one of the engineering challenges of building 6G infrastructure is managing the cost and complexity of deploying two separate technology stacks — one for fibre and one for wireless — that have to be carefully interfaced at every connection point.
The 86-channel 8K video demonstration is the most concrete expression of what this throughput delivers. Each 8K video stream requires several gigabits per second of sustained bandwidth.
Broadcasting 86 of them simultaneously from a single wireless transmitter, in real time, across the 138-to-223 GHz band, represents a density of wireless capacity roughly an order of magnitude beyond what the 5G standard supports.
The chip was fabricated using standard photonic fabrication processes and does not require specialised materials beyond the thin-film lithium niobate platform, which is already used commercially in optical modulators for data centre interconnects. The researchers argue this makes the path to deployment more realistic than previous sub-terahertz wireless demonstrations that required custom semiconductor processes.
Sources
Zhang, Y., Shu, H., Guo, Y., Zhou, P., Wang, L. et al. “Integrated photonics enabling ultra-wideband fiber–wireless communication.” Nature, vol. 651, p. 350 (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10172-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10172-9 Published online: 19 February 2026. Corresponding authors: Wang Xingjun, Yu Shaohua, Chen Baile, Shu Haowen.
ShanghaiTech University. “Breakthrough by scientists in ultra-wideband fiber–wireless communication.” School of Information Science and Technology News, 27 February 2026. https://www.shanghaitech.edu.cn/eng/2026/0227/c1685a1119508/page.htm
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Sam Brown holds a BSc in Electronic Systems Engineering from University of Regina, a Masters from the University of Alberta and a PhD from the University of Toronto in Electrical Engineering. His reporting interests include Physics and Artificial Intelligence.