OFC 2025 industry reflections - Part 3

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the OFC show in San Francisco. In the penultimate part, the contributions are from Cisco's Bill Gartner, Lumentum's Matt Sysak, Ramya Barna of Mixx Technologies, and Ericsson's Antonio Tartaglia.

San Francisco skyline. Source: Shutterstock

Bill Gartner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Optical Systems and Optics, Cisco  

There was certainly much buzz around co-packaged optics at Nvidia’s GTC event, and that carried over into OFC.

The prevailing thinking seems to be that large-scale co-packaged optics deployment is years away. While co-packaged optics has many benefits, there are challenges that need to be overcome before that happens.

Existing solutions, such as linear pluggable optics (LPO), continue to be discussed as interim solutions that could achieve close to the power savings of co-packaged optics and preserve a multi-vendor pluggable market. That development in the industry will be an intermediate solution before co-packaged optics is required.

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Avicena partners with TSMC to make its microLED links

TSMC, the leading semiconductor foundry, will make the photo-detectors used for Avicena Tech’s microLED optical interconnect technology.

Christoph Pfistner

Avicena is developing an optical interface that uses hundreds of parallel fibre links - each link comprising a tiny LED tranmitter and a silicon photo-detector receiver - to deliver terabit-per-second (Tbps) data transfers.

Avicena is targeting its microLED-based interconnect, dubbed LightBundle, for artifical intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

The deal is a notable step for Avicena, aligning its technology with TSMC’s CMOS manufacturing prowess. The partnership will enable Avicena to transition its technology from in-house prototyping to high-volume production.

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OFC 2025 industry reflections - Part 2

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the 50th-anniversary OFC show in San Francisco. In Part 2, the contributions are from BT's Professor Andrew Lord, Chris Cole, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Juniper Network's Dirk van den Borne.

Exhibition floor. Source: OFC

Professor Andrew Lord, Head of Optical Network Research at BT Group

OFC was a highly successful and lively show this year, reflecting a sense of optimism in the optical comms industry. The conference was dominated by the need for optics in data centres to handle the large AI-driven demands. And it was exciting to see the conference at an all-time attendance peak.

From a carrier perspective, I continued to appreciate the maturing of 800-gigabit plugs for core networks and 100GZR plugs (including bidirectional operation for single-fibre working) for the metro-access side.

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OFC 2025: industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary OFC show in San Francisco. Here are the first contributions from Huawei’s Maxim Kuschnerov, NLM Photonics' Brad Booth, LightCounting’s Vladimir Kozlov, and Jürgen Hatheier, Chief Technology Officer, International, at Ciena.

Source: Shutterstock

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of R&D, Huawei

The excitement of last year's Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics processing unit (GPU) announcement has worn off, and there was a slight hangover at OFC from the market frenzy then.

The 224 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) opto-electronic signalling is reaching mainstream in the data centre. The last remaining question is how far VCSELs will go—30 m or perhaps even further. The clear focus of classical Ethernet data centre optics for scale-out architectures is on the step to 448Gbps-per-lane signalling, and it was great to see many feasibility demonstrations of optical signalling showing that PAM-4 and PAM-6 modulation schemes will be doable.

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OFC 2025: reflecting on the busiest optics show in years

Adtran's Gareth Spence interviews Omdia's Daryl Inniss (left) and the editor of Gazettabyte, live from the conference hall at OFC 2025. 

The discussion covers the hot topics of the show and where the industry is headed next. Click here.

OFC: After the aliens, a decade to rewire the Earth

At the OFC 2025 Rump Session, held in San Francisco, three teams were set a weighty challenge. If a catastrophic event—a visit by aliens —caused the destruction of the global telecommunications network, how would each team’s ‘superheroes’ go about designing the replacement network? What technologies would they use? And what issues must be considered?

 Source: Team A

The Rump Session tackled a provocative thought experiment. If the Earth's entire communication infrastructure vanished overnight, how would the teams go about rebuilding it?

Twelve experts - eleven from industry and one academic - were split into three teams.

The teams were given ten years to build their vision network. A decade was chosen as it is a pragmatic timescale and would allow the teams to consider using emerging technologies.

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oDAC: Boosting data centre speeds with less power

Academics have developed an optical digital-to-analogue converter (oDAC) that promises to rethink how high-speed optical transmission is done.

Professor Ioannis Tomkos

Conceived under the European Commission-funded Flex-Scale project for 6G front-haul, the oDAC also promises terabit links inside the data centre.

The oDAC is expected to deliver a 40 per cent power savings for a 1.6 terabit optical transmitter, which is the ‘send’ path of an optical module.

“It might not be not 50 or 60 per cent, but in this field, even a 25 per cent power saving turns heads,” says Ioannis Tomkos, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, one of the researchers leading the work.

The first proof-of-concept oDAC photonic integrated circuit (PIC) has sent 250 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a single wavelength as part of the European Proteus programme.

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