• A Hybrid Conference – In-Person and Virtual Presentations
  • Technical Conference:  24 – 28 March 2024
  • Exhibition: 26 – 28 March 2024
  • San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA

What’s new this year?

By Weihua Guan


Since the OFC/NFOEC 2012 invited presentations list is already online, I've started to take a look and think about which ones I should attend. As before, OFC/NFOEC 2012 demonstrates a strong connection between research and real applications. Leaders in various areas of optical communications and fiber optics present the most recent advances. For example, Dr. Willner will give a talk on polymer electro optic modulators and Dr. Gaeta will give a talk on nonlinear optical signal processing. I think it's a precious chance that I will be exposed to such high level talks.

Optical networks have been experiencing bandwidth explosions. Sherry McCaughan from AT&T will talk about the next generation routers. I am wondering if the next generation means higher bandwidth, novel architecture, or optics inside? I am going to find it out from this talk. There will be invited presentations covering 100 G OTN, digital signal processing in 100 G networks and next generation ROADM networks. I am interested in most of the topics however I am not sure whether I can attend all of them, what a pity! On the service providers’ side, telecomm experts from Korea and China will give introductions of Korean and Chinese telecomm networks, this will be interesting for equipment suppliers and telecomm investors.

FTTx provides the solution for fast and cost effective access networks. There will be presentations covering PON and PIC technologies. On the market side, FTTH deployment in Deutsche, South America, Africa and China will be introduced. I am interested in this section especially the FTTx in America and China. There is also a talk about Google’s 1 Gbps FTTH network. Since Google has been successful in many products and investments, I expect they will be successful in this field too.

There will be talks about coherent communication systems, including modulation formats, spectral shaping, carrier recovery, FEC coding and digital signal processing. These are particularly interesting for people who work in the transmission systems area. The coherent communications have been thought not possible before the development of high-speed AD/DA chips and digital signal processing. Now the 40 G and 100 G all rely on coherent communication technology. There are also talks on optical signal processing, including nonlinear, ultrafast and RF photonic signal processing. Optical processing could be difficult though I think people will solve the problems one by one, and remember real revolutions are brought by small evolutions!

Passive and active modules including specialty fibers, optical amplifiers and fiber lasers are hot areas too. These include photonic crystal fibers, large mode area fibers, high power fiber lasers, tunable ultra-fast lasers and higher order mode amplifiers. These could be traditional areas while at the same time they are very important areas. For optoelectronic devices, invited presentations cover modulators, transmitters and integrated photonic circuits. Since people are striving to develop next generation optoelectronic devices, I expect novel and fascinating research results will be presented.

Let's go to the invited presentations and enjoy the chance to learn and socialize with experts and peers in the optic fiber communication field.

Weihua Guan, optical research engineer at Oplink Communications, Inc.

Posted: 2 September 2011 by Weihua Guan | with 0 comments

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The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition (OFC)  or its sponsors.