• Technical Conference:  30 March – 03 April 2025
  • Exhibition: 01 – 03 April 2025
  • Moscone Center, San Francisco, California, USA

OFC Blog

40G to 100G Ethernet: By The Numbers

By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 25 June 2014

Is it possible to think of something without knowing a word to describe it ?  According to some studies, humans understand the concept of numbers and counting before knowing the words for those numbers.  Perhaps that means that this month’s blog will be easier for everyone to understand, since I’ve found that it’s hard to describe the emerging market for 40 – 100 Gbit/s optical links without using an awful lot of numbers (I needed to use 65 numbers in this post alone, including that last one).  

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Confessions of an Optics Hipster

By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 24 April 2014

What’s the big deal with all this buzz about SDN?

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OFC Day 4 – Wednesday, March 12 – What a world (of photonics)…

By Casimer DeCusatis Ph.D | Posted: 13 March 2014

Welcome back to my daily blog about OFC 2014. Today we’ll be taking a look at the wide world of photonics represented at OFC, from service providers and cloud computing to optoelectronic packaging and software for dynamic network provisioning.

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OFC Day 3 - Tuesday, March 11 - Plenaries, Posters, & Exhibits, oh my!

By Casimer DeCusatis Ph.D | Posted: 12 March 2014

Another full day of events at OFC…today I’ll be checking out the plenary sessions, wandering through the posters & vendor exhibits, and taking in a few interactive sessions as well.

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Coherent optical OFDM: What is it good for?

By Vivian (Xi) Chen | Posted: 11 March 2014

OFDM, short for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, is a method of encoding data on multiple carrier frequencies. And the coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) is OFDM data that is being modulated to light frequency and being detected in coherent manner. Though OFDM has been standardized in wireless communication (e.g. IEEE 802.11) for a long time, the CO-OFDM was proposed around 2008 and is a relatively new concept for optical fiber transmission.

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What are the possible ways to combat fiber nonlinearity?

By Vivian (Xi) Chen | Posted: 11 March 2014

Fiber nonlinearity is and important concerns for large capacity fiber transmission. When we try to increase system capacity, we occupy a wide optical bandwidth and use a high order modulation format, and thus need a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to keep a certain level of bit-error-rate (BER). Consequently, more and more power is launched into the fiber. It is then that the fiber nonlinear effect becomes a significant factor that degrades signal quality.

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OFC Day 2 - Monday, March 10 - Follow the 100G road

By Casimer DeCusatis Ph.D | Posted: 11 March 2014

OFC 2014 is in full swing by now, and as usual I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of events running in parallel. It’s just not possible for one person to cover the entire conference, but I think you’ll find the highlights that I’ve selected for today’s blog to be both interesting and controversial.

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OFC Day 1 - Sunday, March 9 - Off to see the wizards...

By Casimer DeCusatis Ph.D. | Posted: 10 March 2014

Welcome to my daily blog from OFC 2014!  For the duration of the conference, I’ll be updating you on some of the most interesting topics at the event, reviewing key presentations, and generally taking the pulse of OFC.  We’ve got a lot to cover, starting with the conference kickoff events.

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“Unstoppable” Virtualization Means More Network Hits in 2014

By Daniel Tardent | Posted: 6 March 2014

It might be too early to call 2014 the “year of virtualization” but there’s no doubting that use of the technology will grow as will its impact on data center networks. 
 
Virtualization is good news for server utilization, power consumption and application performance.  But it is not so good for the network, because virtualization adds extra network loads that can have a significant impact on performance and response times.

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How to convince your boss that you should go to OFC in 3 easy steps

By Casimer DeCusatis Ph.D. | Posted: 6 March 2014

It’s been said that the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow because it’s such an intimate part of their daily lives.  I’ve been building up my own list of words for “busy”…early last year my work was “really really busy”, then for a month or so it was just “really busy”, and in January it jumped back up to “crazy insane Defcon 4 duck-and-cover busy”.   I suspect your work has been the same – tighter budgets, shorter deadlines, pressure to do more with less. 
 

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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.