IT from Adlershof enhances TV-Images
...and secures industrial production
Whether TV images, sound, or lignite – the efficiency of their production is enhanced by components from the company FOC fibre optical components. And where the security of industrial production is concerned, this finds a guardian angel in the form of the mGuard platform, a product of Innominate Security Technologies AG.
Ever higher TV definition, optimally in 3D, and ever better sound – the mass of data that these require is constantly growing. The usual metal and copper cables as the transmission media are being replaced to an ever greater extent with thinner optical fibres of higher efficiency. TV stations want to broadcast as many camera images and microphone sounds as possible from the OB van – and this uses CWDM technology (coarse wavelength division multiplexing). This splits the light in the optical fibre into eighteen colours or wavelengths, each of which can be used as a transmission channel for image and sound data. This technology has greatly increased transmission capacities. “We can miniaturise the CWDM modules to a thir tieth or fiftieth of their original size. That’s a first the world over, and it increases data transmission,” explained Christian Kutza, founder and Managing Director of FOC-fibre optical components GmbH in Adlershof.
While he was still studying engineering at Humboldt-Universität, he laid the foundations for the base technology that FOC is using today. Yet the company not only enhances the visual and auditory delights of video production, its optoelectronics even find application in an opencast lignite mine in Lusatia. Here, intelligent CWDM sensors analyse the quality of coal over the twenty kilometres of conveyor belts from the pit to the power station and forward the data via optical fibres.
Unlike copper cables, optical fibres are impervious to electromagnetic interference. Instead of video production and coal monitoring, Innominate Security Technologies AG deals with “classical” industrial production. “Many control systems in automation pose a security risk. That’s our chance,” explained Director Dirk Seewald. Innominate’s mGuard platform embodies a variety of security functions: firewalls, encryption, authentication, and integrity monitoring. Particularly impressive: the technology that generates a fingerprint from files could have detected the elaborate Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear plants on the very first day, according to a study by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe.
By Ulrich Hottelet for Adlershof Special