The Internet today transmits hundreds of terabits per second, consumes 9% of all electricity worldwide and grows by 20–30% per year^1,2. To support capacity demand, massively parallel communication links are installed, not scaling favourably concerning energy consumption. A single frequency comb source may substitute many parallel lasers and improve system energy-efficiency^3,4. We present a frequency comb realized by a non-resonant aluminium-gallium-arsenide-on-insulator (AlGaAsOI) nanowaveguide with 66% pump-to-comb conversion efficiency, which is significantly higher than state-of-the-art resonant comb sources. This enables unprecedented high data-rate transmission for chip-based sources, demonstrated using a single-mode 30-core fibre. We show that our frequency comb can carry 661 Tbit s^–1 of data, equivalent to more than the total Internet traffic today. The comb is obtained by seeding the AlGaAsOI chip with 10-GHz picosecond pulses at a low pump power (85 mW), and this scheme is robust to temperature changes, is energy efficient and facilitates future integration with on-chip lasers or amplifiers^5,6.

今天的互联网每秒传输数百兆兆比特，消耗全球所有电量的9％，并且每年以20％至30％的速度增长^1,2。为了支持容量需求，安装了大规模的并行通信链路，因此在能耗方面并没有得到很好的扩展。单个频率梳源可以替代许多并行激光器，并提高系统能效^3,4。我们提出了一种由非共振绝缘体上的铝镓镓砷（AlGaAsOI）纳米波导实现的频率梳，其泵浦至梳状转换效率为66％，远高于最新的谐振梳状源。使用单模30芯光纤证明，这为基于芯片的信号源提供了前所未有的高数据速率传输。我们证明，我们的频率梳可以承载661 Tbit s ^–1的数据，相当于今天的Internet流量的总和。通过在低泵浦功率（85 mW）上向AlGaAsOI芯片注入10 GHz皮秒脉冲来获得梳状结构，该方案对温度变化具有鲁棒性，具有高能效，并便于将来与片上激光器或放大器进行集成，^{5 6}。