We are living in digital world. We are transmitting huge amount of data for music and films streaming, social media use, and cloud-based storage services. Moreover, all these activities need data transmission through fiber optic cables. At the same time, all these activities also need enormous electricity as well. The rate of electricity use is expected to be increased at an imaginable rate. But we have limited the sources for its production. The latest research at Chalmers University of Technology focuses on creating more energy efficient fiber optic communication systems.
Research at Chalmers Offers Energy Efficient System
The 5-year research project proposes smart and error-correcting data chip circuits. The key specialty of these chip circuits is their ability to work using about tenfold less energy. The project’s scientific articles are open for access in the journal Nature Communications. Peter Andrekson is the head of this project. He said, “The key challenge is to meet that foreseeable demand for performance and capacity. At the same time, we need to keep prices at an affordable level and minimize the ecological impacts.”
Scientists from the Chalmers University spotted the biggest energy drains in the fiber optic systems. Furthermore, this information helped them to design and shape a new data transmission system that requires extremely less energy. In addition, researchers highlighted that the optimization of the system components against each other can result in noteworthy energy savings. At present, error-correction data chips are the most energy-intensive components.
Generally, the key use of these data chips in optical systems is to avoid interference and noise. Scientists at the Chalmers recently redesigned these data chips with optimized circuits. At the same time, they underlined the advantages of optical frequency combs’ use in place of individual laser transmitters for every frequency channel. Moreover, the study focuses on making the use of internet technologies with extensively more energy efficient way.
