EPIC Members Event ReportTechnical Conference: 9-13 March 2014

Exposition: 11-13 March 2014Moscone Center, San Francisco, California, USA

http://www.ofcconference.org

Prepared byKatarzyna ŁawniczukJePPIXEindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlandscoordinator@jeppix.euwww.jeppix.eu

About the EPIC Members Event Reports

Initiated by the founder of EPIC Dr. Thomas Pearsall in 2003, these reports are prepared bymembers of EPIC to the benefit of the wider community. If you did not have a chance to attendthe event but would like to know some key highlight, this report is for you. Emphasis is placedon exploring technical and business opportunities for the members of EPIC. If you are an eventorganizer and would like your event covered by EPIC, if you would like to volunteer for writinga report, or if you have any comments to this report, please contact info@epic-assoc.com.

Contents

1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Exposition and the EPIC pavilion . . . . . . . . 2

3 Technical sessions and workshops . . . . . . . 4

4 OFC in 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Moscone Center in San Franciscowelcomes attendees of the OFC 2014 conference

and exposition.

1 Overview

The OFC (Optical Fiber Communication) conferenceis the premiere event and exposition on optical fibercommunication, converging breakthrough research& innovation, and setting future industry trends intelecommunications, optical networking, fiber optics,datacom and computing. OFC gives a strong technicalprogramme and valuable overview of current productsand services on the today’s market, focusing this yearon space-division multiplexing (SDM), silicon photon-ics, 1 Tb/s optical networking on the technical side,while data centers, photonic integration, 100G+ co-herent transmission and software-defined networking(SDN) on the exhibit side. This year the technical pro-gramme included two special symposia, one on ad-vanced electro-optic packaging and assembly technol-

ogy, and the second one on data centers as a network.The OFC conference provided more than 100 techni-cal sessions and invited over 120 speakers, featuredthree showfloor theaters at two exhibition halls, shortcourses, workshops and product showcases. The OFC2014 was held in Moscone Center, in San Francisco,California, USA, and in numbers it can be presented as:

• 5 intensive days

• 12700 attendees

• 550 exhibitors

• 11 parallel technical sessions

• 14 focused topics

• 17 tutorial presentations

• 120+ invited speakers

• 800 presentations

• 2 poster sessions

• 50+ short courses

• 13 workshops

• 5 show-floor panels

• 2 special symposia

• 1 rump session

• 8+ product showcases

The plenary session highlighted the network evolu-tion and virtualization, telecom infrastructure and lim-its of fiber communication. The OFC trends reachedadvanced packaging aspects to meet the latest threedimensional packaging options for optical systems,cloud computing and new requirements for the op-tically interconnected data center, optimized packet-optical solution for Ethernet, traffic management inoptical transport networks. Software defined network-ing (SDN) together with photonic devices seemed to bekey enablers for next generation solutions with highercapacity, bandwidth management and network con-trol.Hot topics this year at the OFC technical presentationsincluded: optical access networks and FTTx technolo-gies, optical and optoelectronic devices, photonic ICs,datacom, optical processing and analog systems. In ad-dition, a set of technical presentations were selected forrecording. These can be accessed by visiting the OFCwebsite: www.ofcconference.org.

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The exposition hall: EPIC pavilion and EPIC members.

2 Exposition and the EPIC pavilion

More than five hundred companies exhibited theirproducts and services in two expo-halls in the MosconeCenter in San Francisco. Over 100 announcementswere made with latest news about optical transceivers,100G coherent modules and deployments, data centerarchitectures, photonic ICs, software-based solutions.The service provider summit keynote speaker, RandyNicklas (president and CTO, Windstream, USA) gavea talk about evolving roles of packet optical and OTNtechnologies. The key players in optical communica-tion were present at the OFC, and among them, thefollowing EPIC members: 3SPGroup, Bright Photonics,CEA-LETI, ficonTEC, Fraunhofer HHI, Huawei, JePPIX,Oclaro, PhoeniX Software, SMART Photonics, SUSS Mi-croOptics, VLC Photonics, and Yelo.

2.1 Show floor and Market Watch

The show floor programme and market watch wereheld in three expo theaters. A number of panel discus-sions related to the future market trends and dominanttechnologies were addressed, where companies pro-vided insights through their active participation. Orga-nizers offered a panel workshop on photonic startupsand entrepreneurship, as it was during the last OFC, in2013. The show floor programming covered the follow-ing topics:

• Business: optical communication market, notingthat telecom services are worth $3.34 trillion world-wide, with optical networking systems and opticalcomponents in the $15 billion+ range;

• Networks: discussing the future of the metro corenetwork and 400GE standardization;

• Data center & SDN: solutions for cloud computingand SDN-enabled optical transport;

• FTTX: toward 100G and 400G optics and networkcomponents, passive optical LAN and plastic opticalfiber technologies;

• Product showcases: transport SDN, next generationoptical network developments, 400GE technology,lithium niobate film and their applications, compactphotonic ICs for 100G, advances in NG-PON2 imple-mentation.

The Market Watch was composed of five panels:

• State of the industry: and shaping the future ofthe optical communication, defining virtualized net-works by software, reaching 100G market.

• What is happening for 100G and beyond ecosys-tem? Various topics on recent advances and trendsfor digital coherent 100 Gb/s and beyond technolo-gies, transport SDN for easier management;

The EPIC pavilion at the OFC expo.

• Data center architecture and content deliverystrategies. Related to market transitions for 100Goptics and cloud computing, data centers virtual-ization and interconnects, giving optical technologytrends in data centers, proposing new architectureswith collapsed layers;

• 100G/400G Pluggable Optics and its enabling tech-nologies. Latest status on various high-speed plug-gable optics, including InP coherent modules for200G, optical integration and low power DSP for thenext generation optics, reaching cost-efficiency for100G/400G client optical interface and DWDM appli-cations;

• PIC vs. Si Photonics: Hype or reality? Trends inphotonic integration technologies on indium phos-phide and silicon, and merging these with intelli-gence and programmability, to reach for higher den-sity, low power, high-capacity and cost efficiencies.Giving conclusion that PICs are in the market now,and have further application potential.

Market Watch and panel on PIC vs. Si Photonics.

In summary, and according to the panel discussion“Buzz – A Real-Time Look at the News and Trends Hap-pening at OFC”, the companies began to deliver theirpromises from the last few years. 100G products andservices are available. 200G is just happening, while400G seems to be around the corner. “Everything thatwas promised is here or on its way”, said one of thepanel moderators (Julie Kunstler, Ovum).

2.2 Rump session on traffic growth

During the OFC 2014, a rump session questioned if thetraffic growth will break the Internet - and can optical

Rump session facing fiber capacity limits.

communication help? The session was moderated byAndrew Lord (BT Innovate and Design, United King-dom) and Jörg-Peter Elbers (VP Advanced Technology,ADVA Optical Networking, Germany), and formed bya wide discussion with the audience, and built aroundthe following topics:

• Will we face a fundamental fiber capacity limit?

• How much time and capacity can we win by optimiz-ing networks?

• If operational cost is the dominant factor, how muchof a problem is fiber capacity then?

• What is the next innovation and technology step toprovide × 10 capacity?

• Can we improve existing infrastructure or are therenew technologies to leverage?

• Which optics and electronics do we need, in particu-lar in which mix and integration depth?

During the rump session 100+ people showed up, whilethe discussion took around 2 hours. It was clear thatthere is a maximum amount of data to be transmit-ted in the C band, and without innovation the band-width costs will keep increasing, as well as optical de-vices costs. An optimized systems and network archi-tectures, new fibre types utilizing SDM are one of thesolutions.

2.3 Photonic integrated circuit workshop

The workshop on photonic integration was organizedby 7 Pennies Consulting together with Si2, supportedby EPIC, on the evening of March 12th, and broughttogether all Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) brokering or-ganizations along with design automation tools, pho-tonic design kit tools, design services, and packaging.

The workshop provided the audience, of more than 200attendees, with a good overall picture of the state-of-art in PICs as well as how one can take advantage ofthe existing suppliers, focusing on providing practicalinformation regarding the design considerations, ma-terial choices, and manufacturing processes needed tocreate photonic ICs. During the workshop, brokers ofInP, Si and TriPleX technology platforms gave their pre-sentations.

Photonic integrated circuit workshop.

This workshop was represented by a number of EPICmembers (LioniX, JePPIX, PhoeniX Software, VLC Pho-tonics, Bright Photonics, Huawei, Technobis), and en-riched by the user case presentations of companiesthat participated in MPW runs to develop photonic ICs,and these were Huawei, Technobis Fibre Technologies,Morton Photonics, TeraXion.

3 Technical sessions and workshops

The technical programme at OFC 2014 was composedof more than 800 presentations, selected based on highquality standards. Two poster sessions were organizedin the expo hall, where more than 120 OFC articles weredisplayed. Plenary sessions were featured by David D.Clark (senior research scientist from MIT, USA), GarySmith (president and CEO of Ciena, USA), and RobertW. Tkach (director in Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, USA).

3.1 Hot topics

• Radio-over-Fiber links and technologies, giving in-sights to 50-Gbps wireless transmission - M2D.2,

wireless link operation at 71-85 GHz E-band - M2D.4,or optical system based on antenna polarization di-versity - M3D.7.

• Photonic ICs: including RF photonic devices: recon-figurable RF arbitrary waveform synthesis - Tu2A.2,high-power microwave photonic devices - Tu2A.4, atunable Hilbert transformer - Tu2A.6; InP photonicdevices: WDM transmitter - Tu3H.2, multi-frequencywavelength converter - Tu3H.3, optoelectronic cir-cuit for 100G Ethernet - Tu3H.6; Si photonic devices:monolithic coherent receiver - W1I.5, a CMOS plat-form for TB/s optical interconnects - Th1C.2, WDMmodulator array - Th1C.5, hybrid silicon photonicsintegration - Th4G4.

• High speed transmitters and receivers: presentingreliability of VCSELs - M3G.2, and including sessionsrelated to photodetectors, like: 50 GHz waveguidephotodiode module - M2G.1, 80 GHz balanced pin-detector chip - M2G.3;

• Cloud and virtualized networks: covering the topicsof network virtualization - M2B.5 and survivability -M2H.3, resilience to data loos in optical cloud net-works - M2H.4, heterogeneous bandwidth provision-ing for virtual machine migration and SDN-enabledoptical network - M3H.2, and towards software de-fined optical solutions - M3H.5.

• Network planning, multi-layer networks and NG-PON2: and strategies for next-generation flexible op-tical networks - M2B.1, metro transport architectures- M3B.3, optimization of the networks -M3B.6, opticalcomponent technology for NG PON2 systems - M3I.1.

• Specialty fibers and nonlinear effects in opticalfibers: including dispersion fluctuation invariantfibers - Tu2K.2, specialty fibers for sensor applica-tions - Tu3K.1, plastic optical fibers - Tu3K.2, pho-tonic crystal fibers with large mode area - Tu3K.6; aswell as covering the fiber nonlinear mitigation andcompensation - M3C field.

3.2 Workshops

Thirteen workshops were offered in the OFC 2014 pro-gramme, and the events covered the following top-ics: quantum cryptography, optical amplifiers for SDM,100G interfaces for metro access, software-defined op-tical access, packaging and reliability of Si photonics,

commercial application of single-fiber SDM, DSP forshort reach applications. Apart from the workshops,the attendees could gain insights into one of the fiftytopics discussed during the short courses. Among oth-ers: high-speed semiconductor lasers and modulators,new developments in optical transport networking,data center cabling, fundamentals of super computing,wireless backhaul, hands-on polarization-related mea-surements, highly integrated monolithic photonic in-tegrated circuits, microwave photonics, quantum cryp-tography and quantum information.

Poster session in one of the expo halls of the OFC.

3.3 Special symposia

Two special symposia were organized during the OFC2014. They covered the following field:

• Advanced packaging and assembly technologies.The symposium addressed the importance and chal-lenges of packaging of photonic components and op-tical systems, their performance, power dissipationand related costs. Some examples of chip-to-chipoptical interconnects, board-mounted optical assem-blies, and high-density photonic interconnects weredemonstrated.

• Enabling the cloud: datacenter network infras-tructure. The symposium focused on challengeswhile building cloud scale data centers, introduc-ing modern network architectures, targeting high-performance services via optical layer programmabil-ity and virtualization, and extending SDN beyond thedata center walls.

3.4 Post-deadline session

The post deadline paper session ended OFC 2014 con-ference and exposition. 25 high-tech achievementswere presented, filling 3 presentation rooms to theirlimits. Some of the top research contributions were:multi-layer SDN on a commercial network controlplatform - ThA.1, 30 Gbps optical link utilizing het-erogeneously integrated III-V/Si photonics and CMOScircuits - Th5A.6, 30.6 Tb/s full-duplex bidirectionaltransoceanic transmission - Th5B.5, PIC-to-PIC experi-ment at 130 Gb/s - Th5C.2, ultra-compact InP transmit-ter at 244 Gb/s PDM-2ASK-2PSK modulation - Th5C.3.

Post-deadline session: rooms filled to their limits.

4 OFC in 2015

The next year’s event of OFC technical conference and exposition will take place March 22nd - 26th in Los Angeles:

Technical Conference 22-26 March 2015Exposition 24-26 March 2015Los Angeles Convention CenterLos Angeles, California, USA

JePPIX is a broker that provides access to advanced fabrication processes for Photonic Integrated Circuits.JePPIX aims at low-cost development of Photonic ICs and rapid prototyping via full-scale industrial Multi-ProjectWafer runs. JePPIX closely collaborates with Europe’s key players in the field of photonic integration, includingmanufacturing and packaging partners, photonic CAD software partners, R&D labs and photonic IC designhouses. With JePPIX you can get access to the Indium Phosphide (InP)-based monolithic integration platformsof Oclaro, Fraunhofer HHI and SMART Photonics and to the low-loss dielectric TriPleX waveguide technology ofLioniX. Contact JePPIX and get your photonic ICs fabricated. www.jeppix.eu

Multi-project InP wafer with photonic ICs

Research Projects:

ACTPHAST (Access CenTre for PHotonics innovAtion Solutions and Technology support) www.actphast.euLightJumps (An efficient and effective platform for the cooperation of photonic clusters and the exploitation ofthe European SME potential) www.lightjumps.euMEMPHIS II (Merging Electronics and Micro and nano-Photonics in Integrated Systems) http://www.smartmix-memphis.nlPARADIGM (Photonic Advanced Research and Development for Integrated Generic Manufacturing)www.paradigm.jeppix.eu

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About EPIC – European Photonics Industry Consortium

EPIC is a membership-led not-for-profit industry association that promotes the sustainable developmentof organisations working in the field of photonics. Our members encompass the entire value chainfrom LED lighting, PV solar energy, Silicon photonics, Optical components, Lasers, Sensors, Displays,Projectors, Optic fiber, and other photonic related technologies. We foster a vibrant photonics ecosystemby maintaining a strong network and acting as a catalyst and facilitator for technological and commercialadvancement. www.epic-assoc.com

EPIC Members (1 March 2014)

3S Photonics Group, ACREO, Advanced Fibre Optic Engineering, Aifotec Fiberoptics, AIM Infrarot-Module,Aixtron SE, ALSI, ALEDIA, ALPHA Route des Lasers, Alphanov, ALTER Technologies, AMO, Amplitude Systèmes, artphotonics, ASE Europe, ASE Optics Europe, Australian National University, Avantes, BBright SAS, Bright Photonics,CEA-LETI, CAILabs, Caliopa, CD6, Centre for Nanophotonics FOM, Centre for Physical Sciences & Technology,Chalmers University of Technology, CIP, COBOLT, CMC Microsystems, COBRA Research School, CSEM, DASPhotonics, DELTA Optical Filters, DIAFIR, Dilas Diodenlaser, Dow Corning, Edmund Optics, Eolite Systems, ESPKTN, Exalos, FiconTEC, FOTONIKA-LV University of Latvia, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE,Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Engineering, Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology, FraunhoferInstitute for Material and Beam Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, FraunhoferInstitute for Telecommunications Heinrich Hertz Institute, Glyndwr University, Integrated Photonics, HamamatsuPhotonics, Haute Ecole ARC Ingénierie, Heraeus Noblelight, Heriot-Watt University, Hisilicon Technologies,Horiba Scientific, Huawei, ICFO - Institute of Photonic Sciences, IDIL Fibres Optiques, IHP Leibnitz-Institutfür innovative Mkroelektronik, IKO Science, Imagine Optic, IMT Masken und Teilungen, Innolume, Institutd’Optique Graduate School, INTEC Department of Information Technology, International Laser Center, IPHTLeibniz Institute of Phhotonic Technology, IQE, IREC - Catalonia Institute for Energy Research, IXFIBER, JePPIX,Konica Minolta, Laser & Medical Devices Consulting, LayTec, Lionix BV, Lithuanian Laser Association, LugerResearch, Messe Munich Laser World of Photonics, Microelectronics Institute of Barcelona, CSIC, Modulight,Multiphoton Optics, Multitel, MW Technologies, Nanoscribe, Nanovation, Next Scan Technology, nLIGHT, NOVAELaser, Oclaro, Onefive, OPI Photonics, OpTecBB, Optoelectronics Research Centre Finland, OptoelectronicsResearch Centre Zepler Institute, Opticsvalley, PhoeniX Software, Photonics Bretagne, Pie Photonics, PNOConsultants, PolyPhotonix, Optitec, Powerlase Photonics, Prima Electro, Quantel, Resolution Spectra Systems,Robert Bosch, Rofin Sinar Laser, SAES Getters, SAFC Hitech, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, SensUp, SMARTPhotonics, SOITEC, SPI Lasers, SQS Fiberoptics, STMicroelectronics, Süss MicroOptics, SWISSPHOTONICS,Technobis Group, Technospark Nanocenter, TEMATYS, Thorn Lighting, Tridonic, Technical University of Berlin,TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), Time-Bandwidth Products, Tyndall NationalInstitute, Umicore OEM, University College London, University of Barcelona, University of Reggio CalabriaDIIES, University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, University Paderborn, u2t Photonics, VI Systems, vario-optics, Vertilas, VLC Photonics, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, WJA Electron, Wroclaw University ofTechnology, XiO Photonics, Yenista Optics, YELO, YOLE Développement, Zumtobel.

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