It is estimated that the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector is responsible for 1.8 %-2.8 % of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A 10 % reduction of energy consumption would therefore have the potential to prevent millions of tons of GHG emissions and slow down global warming. At the same time, the use of video platforms, streaming services and online gaming is increasing the bandwidth of the signals to be processed and thus the energy consumption of current communication systems. It is already foreseeable that new applications such as autonomous driving, 6G and Industry X.0 will continue to ensure increasing data rates.
The THz Photonics Group (TPG) at TU Braunschweig is therefore focusing primarily on increasing the transmission speed of communication systems and expanding the bandwidth of measuring devices and sensors while simultaneously reducing their energy consumption. We achieve this by optical or optically assisted electronic signal processing on various integrated platforms with frequency comb generation, orthogonal sampling, frequency-time coherence, or non-linear optical effects such as stimulated Brillouin scattering.
For simulations and the design of integrated photonic chips, licences of commercial software packages like COMSOL Multiphysics, Optisystem and Lumerical are available. The chips are then manufactured either in commercial fabs or at partner universities in Israel and China.
The laboratories of the TPG are fully equipped to test and characterize the raw chips (without packaging). In addition to standard equipment such as optical and electrical spectrum analyzers, filters, signal generators etc., arbitrary waveform generators and real-time oscilloscopes with analogue bandwidths of 33 GHz are available.
[1] Freitag et al., (2021), ‘The Real Climate and Transformative Impact of ICT: A Critique of Estimates, Trends, and Regulations’, Patterns