A shorter cycle of use and reuse of gold in electronics, in-volving fewer process steps and less energy consuming, can be achieved using hydrometallurgical processing with cyanide free, nontoxic and partly biodegradable bath solu-tions. This improves the overall environmental perform-ance of gold plated electronic assemblies. The inclusion of environmental assessment at an early stage of the development besides technical and economical optimization leads to process integrated environmental protection and is profitable for the industry as well as for the Environment

Continued cost-and power-efficient capacity scaling in optical networks is imperative to keep pace with ever-increasing traffic demands. In this paper, we investigate multi-wavelength transponders as a potential way forward. Suitable system architectures and realistic specifications of multi-wavelength transponders are identified and analyzed in terms of transmit OSNR penalties and spectral constraints. We investigate the performance for different specifications as compared to single-wavelength transponders in a network planning study on two network topologies, developing guidelines for multi-wavelength transponders specifications and their potential benefits. The studies show a reduction in the number of required lasers of up to 83 % at the expense of a slight increase in number of lightpaths, demonstrating the potential for significant cost savings and efficiency improvements.

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