C. Klamouris

Optically powered fiber networks

Optically powered networks are demonstrated. Heterogeneous subscribers having widely varying needs with respect to power and band-width can be effectively controlled and optically supplied by a central of-fice. The success of the scheme relies both on power-efficient innovative hardware and on a novel low-energy medium access control protocol. We demonstrate a sensor network with subscribers consuming less than 1 microW average power, and an optically powered high-speed video link transmitting data at a bitrate of 100 Mbit/s.

An Optically Powered Video Camera Link

An optically powered camera sensor link is demonstrated. Power and data are transmitted over a 62.5-?m multimode glass fiber. Uncompressed video with 640 × 480 pixels resolution is streamed continuously at 100 Mb/s as soon as the fiber is illuminated with sufficient optical power. No energy has to be stored at the sensor location in batteries with limited capacities and lifetimes. Inexpensive fiber optics and low-power state-of-the-art electronics are used to make >100 mW available at sites which have no direct access to an electrical network. There is a complete electrical isolation between the remote camera unit and a base station.

Optically Powered Video Camera Link

An optically powered camera sensor link is demonstrated. Power and data are transmitted over a 62.5-¿m multimode glass fiber. Uncompressed video with 640 × 480 pixels resolution is streamed continuously at 100 Mb/s as soon as the fiber is illuminated with sufficient optical power. No energy has to be stored at the sensor location in batteries with limited capacities and lifetimes. Inexpensive fiber optics and low-power state-of-the-art electronics are used to make >100 mW available at sites which have no direct access to an electrical network. There is a complete electrical isolation between the remote camera unit and a base station.

Optically Powered Platform with Mb/s Transmission over a Single Fiber

We demonstrate an optically powered sensor platform that acquires and returns data at 4 Mbit/s. The platform is optically powered over fiber by a remote laser at 1 km distance. It is electrically isolated from the base station.

Reconfigurable Hardware for Power-over-Fiber Applications

In this paper we present an optically powered and motorized video camera system. Energy for the camera sensor is supplied by a glass fiber carrying 800 mW of optical power, which the sensor converts back to 320 mW of electrical power. The specific advantage of this arrangement is galvanic isolation and a very high robustness with respect to electromagnetic interference. We demonstrate that sufficient energy can be transmitted for driving an Actel Igloo FPGA, which performs the necessary signal processing. Additionally, with the help of capacitive energy storage, some small actuators can be supplied which move the camera sensor head. The base station of the system, based on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, holds a LEON-3 based system-on-chip encoding the incoming VGA video stream into Motion-JPEG formatted data in realtime, which may be directly sent to the internet using an Ethernet interface. The prototype has numerous fields of application where it performs much better than stateof-the-art solutions. Most prominent examples are visual sensors in high voltage areas as well as medical endoscopes.