Short Courses

As demand for network bandwidth continues to grow unabated, coherent optical communication systems – once limited to the domain of long-haul transmission systems – are finding increasingly widespread deployment at scale, from metro/regional networks to data center interconnects....

This short course teaches participants how to model silicon photonic components, design and have fabricated simple passive photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are experimentally characterized. Numerous companies are presently developing products in applications such as short-reach optical...

The course is intended for the students and engineers who have a basic background and experience in optical subsystems and the design of DSP algorithms but are beginners in the FPGA programming and FPGA prototyping of optical subsystems. The course gives insights to participants on FPGA...

This short course gives a broad overview of data center interconnect (DCI) architectures and technology in cloud-scale networks, ranging from short-haul interconnects of just a few kilometers across a campus network, to metro and finally long-haul deployments. In particular, we focus in this...

This course aims to provide participants with the tools and knowledge to create sustainable automation of their experiments using the Python programming language.

This is a beginner’s course, which does not assume any prior knowledge in Python or lab automation, or those...

The first half of the course will cover the design of data center optical links. We will describe the basic components of data center optical links and introduce the concept of the power budget including power penalties and examine possible tradeoffs. We will continue with a discussion of...

This short course focuses on fiber sensing utilizing the deployed active fiber-optic telecommunication network. Specifically, the curriculum emphasizes distributed fiber sensing through the analysis of backscattered light from optical fibers, with a primary concentration on distributed...

The transmission capacity required by modern fiber-optic communication systems often significantly exceeds the capacity of a single fiber, therefore requiring new cost effective fibers and components to support massive parallel optical paths (space-division multiplexing).
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This course is an introduction into multimode devices that control, generate, amplify and manipulate spatial modes. Multimode components are used in many diverse fields including imaging, astronomy, and space-division multiplexing (SDM) communications. These devices include lossless mode...

Optical amplification is a key enabler of modern optical communication systems. Not only do optical amplifiers eliminate the need for electronic repeaters between the fiber spans, but they also do it in a cost-effective way by simultaneously processing a large number of optical channels. The...

This course walks the delegates through an entire optical network life cycle from an operator’s point of view, from the initial requirements, vendor selection, network design and planning, installation and provisioning, operation and management and final use as a legacy technology before...

From the first fiber optic subsea cable to today’s SDM cable system, the capacity per cable has increased 5 orders of magnitudes over the past 30 years. This exponential increase has been driven by ever-growing traffic demands and has been enabled by enormous technological advances in...

In recent years, Reinforcement learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have gained significant attention due to their ability to handle complex...

The field of microwave photonics, sometimes termed RF photonics or analog photonics, has a long history and continues to expand despite the advances in digital electronics and optics.  The Microwave Photonics Short Course has been revised and updated to keep pace with the accelerating...

Optical communication systems have provided ever-increasing data transmission capacities, and there is a set of core concepts that are fundamental to understanding many of the crucial technical areas. The OFC/NFOEC conference has numerous courses teaching advanced topics that require some...

Error-control coding, the technique of adding redundancy in a controlled fashion to transmitted data so as to correct errors introduced by noise or other channel impairments, is a key component of modern optical communication systems. This course introduces basic concepts in coding and...

In this course, we start with circuit design in silicon photonics. As fabrication technology is steadily improving, it becomes possible to implement more complex functionality as a circuit. Circuits are an abstraction where the function is defined as a connected network of functional...

Coherent technology was traditionally used in long-haul and metro networks. However, over the years, it has been increasingly adopted for shorter-reach applications—such as Data Center Interconnects (DCI) and 5G/6G front/backhaul—to overcome the physical limitations of Intensity...

Digital signal processing (DSP) has always been an intrinsic component of optical communications, albeit for simple modulation techniques, framing and coding. The development of high-speed ADCs and DACs, and the increase in data processing power of CMOS ICs has enabled the implementation of...

This course covers emerging optical network technologies towards 2030, which include:

• ...

This Short Course focuses on the practical aspects of working with fiber optic components and instrumentation used to make optical performance characterization measurements.

Through three individual and fully-equipped stations you will get the basic concepts and hands-on use of...

This short course covers practical applications of T-SDN and AI-enabled automation in optical transport networks, extending classical SDN concepts with ML, LLMs, and agentic AI. Using a problem-solution approach, we explore how service providers, hyperscalers, and enterprises can leverage...

This course consists of two parts focusing respectively on free-space switching systems with near-term commercial impact and on chip-scale photonic switching systems with potential for future commercial impact.

The first part will provide an overview of photonic cross connects...

Machine learning (ML) has recently attracted a surge of interest in optical networking and communication research due to its pattern recognition and predictive capabilities for various key applications. Large-scale monitoring data are generated every day in optical networks, which makes ML a...

This course aims to provide participants with the tools and knowledge to create sustainable automation of their experiments using the Python programming language.

This is an advanced Python Short Course which assumes participants have significant programming experience with...

We will address the architecture of optical satellite networks from the Physical to the Transport and Application Layers. New frontiers exist for much more research before an efficient architecture can be constructed. Optical wireless network has the potential to serve space-space, space...

Reliability and qualification of photonic components, equipment and systems are two critical requisites for our modern telecommunication infrastructure.  They are usually one of a customer’s early areas of intensive inquiry for a new supplier and, potentially, some of the biggest...

Over the past decade, data centers have rapidly grown as an enabler of new applications and capabilities (cloud computing, machine learning, internet content streaming, internet search, social networking, etc.). As such, networks inside the datacenter have become the singular force driving the...

With over 3 billion kilometers of transmission optical fiber deployed world-wide, and many hundreds of millions of kilometers being added annually to support the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, the future has never looked brighter for optical networking. Optical fiber cable has long...

This course provides details of a complementary set of standards for high-speed optical networking including the Optical...

We will start with an overview and comparison of different types of optical links: intensity modulated direct detection vs coherent, short reach vs long reach, multi-mode fiber vs single mode, direct modulation vs external modulation. We will discuss the main components of the link data path...

This course will discuss and detail the photonic technologies that are used to connect datacenters. Data center optical interconnects are extremely interesting since they blur the line between traditional datacom and telecom links. The reach requirements, from meters to up to around two...

This course will cover photodetectors most frequently employed for optical receivers, primarily p-i-n and avalanche photodiodes. Their performance parameters and the physical effects that determine those parameters will be discussed. This course will also cover fundamental optical receiver...

This is an advanced-beginner course on Software Defined Networking (SDN) for optical networks. The course will cover the main drivers, uses, key benefits, most recent trends and underlying technologies focusing, notably, on transport networks and covering mainly the aggregation and core...

This course reviews fiber optic sensing (FOS) technology with a principal focus on distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) systems, as well as the associated specialty fiber types and optical components commonly required to provide full sensing systems. Emphasis is placed on reviewing DFOS uses...

This Short Course focuses on the practical aspects of working with fiber optic components and instrumentation used to make optical performance characterization measurements.

Through three individual and fully-equipped stations you will get the basic concepts and hands-on use of...

This course complements short courses SC114 and SC444, and focuses on the overall broadband access system technology and network architecture from an operator’s perspective.

The course begins with an overview of fiber access architectures and drivers for future technology...

Integrated optical modules combine advanced semiconductor technologies, optical and electronic chips, motherboards, micro-optics and heat-management to meet demanding  sub-systems specifications. The assembly, packaging and testing of such modules requires increasingly sophisticated...

The course focuses on the design of optical wireless transmission systems for high-speed optical wireless communications, including applications such as outdoor point-to-point free-space optical (FSO) links for both terrestrial and non-terrestrial use, as well as underwater optical wireless...

Whatever would be the applications (5G, FTTX, MXU, structured cabling, HFC, Quantum optical transmission, etc) it is usually fed with fiber optic.

In a world where datacom is merging with telecom accelerating the deployment of high-speed interfaces on disaggregated networks webbed in...

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming how telecom networks are operated, optimized, and experienced by customers. Traditional network operations rely heavily...