Short Courses

In the past 15 years fiber optic transmission platforms around the world have aggressively adopted Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) into the system product lines, including annual deployments approaching $1 billion of ROADM-packet enabled transport equipment. Despite this wholesale transformation of transport infrastructure, the architecture and value proposition of the technology continues to evolve to meet ever increasing bandwidth demand, most recently from the rollout of Generative Artificial Intelligence services. Technology innovation in transparent optical switching enables increased capacity and flexibility of these systems, as well as new applications within datacenters. This course will give a historical perspective of the technology, the value proposition driving commercial adoption, and how those benefits depend on the functionality of the technology employed. The evolving trends that impact the requirements of reconfigurable line systems will be discussed, as well as the impact of higher bandwidth needs between and within datacenters.

This course should enable you to:

• Describe the architectures and network level benefits of ROADM systems from earliest systems to most sophisticated deployments being planned today.
• Define the different ROADM architectures competing in the market.
• Summarize the functional differences between competing ROADM architectures, which will succeed in the long term and why.
• Compare the network economic advantages of ROADM networks.
• Compare the incremental cost of a ROADM to the network level savings it enables.
• Discuss the types of networks that most fully benefit from ROADM technology and why.
• Explain why the advantages of ROADM networks position the technology to have a role in all parts of the network, including data centers.

Anyone interested in more fully understanding the functionalities and benefits of ROADMs, including students, researchers, engineers, managers, and executives involved in ROADM development, network design, network planning, and network operations.

Thomas A. Strasser developed optical devices in his doctorate from Cornell University, at Eastman Kodak Research Labs (3 years) and at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ (7 years). He pioneered the first commercial deployments of WSS ROADM systems as Chief Technologist at Photuris, has developed advanced ROADM technology for the past 20 years as founder and CTO at Nistica, VP of Technology at Molex, and currently at Infinera. Dr. Strasser has more than 50 patents and 130 presentations and publications in optics and communication devices.