Researchers at my former university in Karlsruhe, Germany, have developed a revolutionary new technology that can power and transport the video data stream over a single fiber optical cable. Although they showed the technology at the ECOC conference two weeks ago in Berlin, it was published in the German IT press only yesterday. No mention in major newspapers though yet. This slow news distribution mirrors a bit the otherwise general lack of innovation in Germany compared with the US and other high-tech countries like Japan. Now they seem to have found a great thing, though.

This development was a joint effort between three research departments: The "Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung" in Karlsruhe worked on the electronics; the highly sensitive photo diode for the conversion of laser light into electrical energy was developed at the "Fraunhofer-Institut für Solare Energiesysteme" in Freiburg; and the optical communication technology was developed at the "Institut Hochfrequenztechnik und Quantenelektronik", also in Karlsruhe.

The optical camera network has phenomenally low power consumption. In total only 100 mW are needed: CMOS-Sensor (40 mW), electronics (40 mW) and transmitting laser (20 mW). The system runs the video data stream with 100 Mbps and uses a wavelength of 1310nm. At the source a 400 mW light at 810nm provides the initial energy; where the photo diode transfers the light into electrical current. The system uses a standard 62,5 um multimode fiber cable.

If this system is indeed robust and can be produced low cost (I don't see why not) then this could be a big innovation to be used in security and sensor networks among many other applications. Now there is of course already Power over Ethernet out there and that supports 100 Mbps as well. So I am not sure how it actually compares with that, for sure it uses much less power but also requires a special CMOS video sensor which is more costly than ultra cheap Ethernet transceivers. We will check that out some more...