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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Books in 2019

Gazettabyte asks industry figures each year to cite the memorable books they have read. These include fiction, non-fiction and work-related titles. 

Here are the choices of Cisco’s Bill Gartner, Sylvie Menezo of silicon photonics start-up, Scintil Photonics, and Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst at Cignal AI.  

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

At the top of my list is The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee does an amazing job of telling the story of the gene, providing historical context dating back to pre-Darwin times through to modern advances in gene therapy. The material is complex but he is great at describing the evolution of thinking about genes and progress in the genome project in layman's terms. 

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