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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Steve Alexander's 30-Year Journey at Ciena

After three decades of shaping optical networking technology, Steve Alexander is stepping down as Ciena's Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

His journey, from working on early optical networking systems to helping to implement AI as part of Ciena’s products, mirrors the evolution of telecommunications itself.

The farewell

"As soon as you say, 'Hey guys, you know, there's an end date', certain things start moving," says Alexander reflecting on his current transition period. "Some people want to say goodbye, others want more of your time."

After 30 years of work, the bulk of it as CTO, Alexander is ready to reclaim his time, starting with the symbolic act of shutting down Microsoft Outlook.

"I don't want to get up at six o'clock and look at my email and calendar to figure out my day,” he says.

His retirement plans blend the practical and the fun. The agenda includes long-delayed home projects and traveling with his wife. "My kids gave us dancing lessons for a Christmas present, that sort of thing," he says with a smile.

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ECOC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent 50th-anniversary ECOC show in Frankfurt. Here are the first contributions from Huawei's Maxim Kuschnerov, Coherent's Vipul Bhatt, and Broadcom's Rajiv Pancholy.

Source: Shutterstock

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

At ECOC, my main interest concerned the evolution of data centre networking to 400 gigabits per lane for optics and electronics. Historically, the adoption of new optical line rates always preceded the serdes electrical interconnects but now copper cables are likely to drive much of the leading development work at 400 gigabit per lane.

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OFC 2024 industry reflections: Part 4

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. This penultimate part includes the thoughts of Cisco’s Ron Horan, Coherent’s Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathi, and Adtran’s Jörg-Peter Elbers.

Ron Horan, Vice President Product Management, Client Optics Group, Cisco   

Several years ago, no one could have predicted how extensive the network infrastructure required to support artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) back-end networks in data centres would be. This year's OFC answered that question. In a word, immense.

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A coherent roadmap for co-packaged optics

Is coherent optics how co-packaged will continue to scale? Pilot Photonics certainly thinks so.

Part 1: Co-packaged optics 

Frank Smyth

Frank Smyth, CTO and founder of Pilot Photonics, believes the firm is at an important inflection point. 

Known for its comb laser technology, Pilot Photonics has just been awarded a €2.5 million European Innovation Council grant to develop its light-source technology for co-packaged optics. 

The Irish start-up is also moving to much larger premises and is on a recruitment drive. “Many of our projects and technologies are maturing,” says Smyth. 

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OFC 2024 reflects a mature industry with new offshoots

• The three General Chairs preview the upcoming Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference and discuss photonics developments and trends.
• The General Chairs' role is to choose the plenary speakers, programme theme, and conference schedule.
• OFC takes place during March 24th-28th in San Diego, CA.*

Photonics, at least for traditional applications, has become a mature industry. So says Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, one of this year's OFC General Chairs.

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou

By traditional, Simeonidou is referring to classical optical communications.

But she also stresses new developments: the use of optical fibres for environmental sensing, optics for satellites, and quantum.

"Quantum is like a micro-OFC," says Simeonidou. "You have issues from technology to subsystem to system applications now appearing in the OFC programmes."

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Working at the limit of optical transmission performance

• Expect to see new optical transmission records at the upcoming ECOC 2023 conference. 
• Keysight Technologies' chart plots the record-setting optical transmission systems of recent years.
• The chart reveals optical transmission performance issues and the importance of the high-speed converters between the analogue and digital domains for test equipment and, by implication, for coherent digital signal processors (DSPs).

Graphic explanation

Shown is the net bit rate plotted against the baud rate. Also shown are lines with the number of bits per symbol. These are not the bit resolution of the DAC but the bits for both polarisations. For example, 14bit/symbol refers to 7-bit per polarisation. The DACs making up the transmission systems plotted are either 6-bit or 8-bit. Source: Keysight

Engineers keep advancing optical systems to send more data across an optical fibre.

It requires advances in optical and electronic components that can process faster, higher-bandwidth signals, and that includes the most essential electronics part of all: the coherent DSP chip. 

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