Shining a Light on Nobel Winners for Fiber Optic and CCD Technology

Beginning
in 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded for pioneering discoveries and
breakthrough inventions. This year, the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences granted the Physics Nobel Prize for two
scientific achievements that have helped “shape
the foundations of today’s networked societies.”

One-half of
this year’s physics award goes to Charles K. Kao for “groundbreaking
achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical
communication.” The other half jointly goes to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith for “the invention of an
imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor.”

In 1966,
Mr. Kao of the Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, U.K. and
Chinese University of Hong Kong, discovered how to transmit light signals long
distances over hair-thin optical glass fibers.

“What the wheel did for transport, the
optical fiber did for telecommunications,” said Richard Epworth, who worked with Kao in the 1960s.

Today, optical fibers are at the core of all communications systems
and enable global broadband communications, such as the Internet. Almost all
long-distance telephony and data traffic, including text, music, still images,
and video, is carried around the world in just a split second on fiber cable.

A large part of that fiber optic
traffic is digital imagery. Boyle and Smith each earned a fourth of the award
for their 1969 invention of the first successful imaging technology using a
digital sensor, or Charge-Coupled Device (CCD). The CCD is the digital
camera’s electronic eye and is the core of digital photography. This remarkable
technology makes use of the photoelectric effect by which light is transformed
into electric signals. The CCD captures the signals and maps them in a large
number of image points or pixels. CCD technology is also used in medical
applications, such as body scans.

Fiber
optics cable is also one of the fastest-growing transmission mediums for both
new cabling installations and upgrades. Sign up for our FREE Fiber Optic Technology white
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Extend your Gigabit network over fiber—and power PoE devices, too!

10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX Ethernet use only two pairs of wire in 4-pair CAT5/CAT5e/CAT6 cable, leaving the other two pairs free to transmit power for Power over Ethernet (PoE) applications. However, Gigabit Ethernet or 1000BASE-T uses all four pairs of wire, leaving no pairs free for power. So how can PoE work over Gigabit Ethernet?

The answer is through the use of phantom power—power sent over the same wire pairs used for data. When the same pair is used for both power and data, the power and data transmissions don’t interfere with each other. Because electricity and data function at opposite ends of the frequency spectrum, they can travel over the same cable. Electricity has a low frequency of 60 Hz or less, and data transmissions have frequencies that can range from 10 million to 100 million Hz.

10- and 100-Mbps PoE may also use phantom power. The 802.3af PoE standard for use with 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX defines two methods of power transmission. In one method, called Alternative A, power and data are sent over the same pair. In the other method, called Alternative B, two wire pairs are used to transmit data, and the remaining two pairs are used for power. That there are two different PoE power-transmission schemes isn’t obvious to the casual user because PoE Powered Devices (PDs) are made to accept power in either format.

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