ECOC WRAP ECOC 2023
Following its success in Basel in 2022, ECOC, Europe’s biggest conference and industry showcase, opened its doors at Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow in October 2023. Visitors to the show were able to enjoy some new features, such as the new Demo Focus, as well as the ever-popular Market Focus and Product Focus theatres. ECOC GOES TO GLASGOW! ECOC 2023 CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION:
THE EXHIBITION Situated on the banks of the River Clyde, in Glasgow, the Scottish Event Campus was the ideal venue for this year’s ECOC expo. With a mixture of optical connectivity market analysis, ground-breaking research and the latest products creating excitement around the SEC, the number of visitors, presentations and exhibitors were all up on last year’s event (see page 25). As hundreds of visitors and exhibitors made their way past the Armadillo building and into the Exhibition hall, they were treated to a stirring bagpipe performance at the entrance to kick off the first day. The piper walked through the concourse, past the many food stalls and features of the venue as onlookers admired the unique and iconic instrument and recorded it on their phones. It wasn’t to be the only attraction to draw the crowds however, from a model F1 car on Infinera’s booth, to multiple VR headsets, to baristas on one or two of the larger stands and, fittingly, cans of Irn-Bru (Scotland’s favourite soft drink) and Tunnocks’ chocolate wafer bars (also an iconic Scottish product) on others, there was plenty to get excited about. But what drew the largest crowds were the features that make ECOC Exhibition what it is. MARKET FOCUS Always a popular and well-attended part of the expo, the Market Focus theatre was larger and more open this year in response to the demand and popularity for the event and predictably, it was overflowing throughout each day of the expo and remains a key staple of the event.
DAY ONE Day one was devoted to Modules and Sub-systems, with morning presentations from, among others, Michael Lebby, CEO Lightwave Logic, who spoke about commercialising reliable hybrid electro- optic polymer modulators; Cisco Fellow, QSFP-DD MSA co-chair, Mark Nowell spoke on the future of pluggable modules at 1.6 Tbps; and Frank Chang, Chief Engineer and CTO at Source Photonics, offered perspectives of linear optical pluggables (LPO) for AI/ML clusters. The afternoon session opened with Lisa Huff, senior principal analyst, Optical Components at Omdia, who talked about how ICP data centres are driving the optical components market. This was followed by a talk on harnessing optical I/O for the advancement of generative AI, by Terry Thorn, VP of Commercial Operations at Ayar Labs. Other talks included VIAVI Solutions’ Technology and applications lead Paul Brooks’s presentation on preparing the way for 800G ZR.
DAY TWO Day two’s theme of Components, ICs, PICs and Fibre, was equally packed with presentations and the morning session kicked off with Corning’s systems engineering manager Lidia Galdino, who gave a presentation on the future needs for cable density and high fibre count cables in terrestrial core networks. Later in the morning, Gunter Larisch, product manager, Datacom at TRUMPF Photonic Components, spoke about VCSELs for >100Gbps interconnects, and OpenLight Photonics’ Steven Alleston, director Business Development gave a presentation on open silicon photonics as an enabling technology. DAY THREE The final day of the expo was given over to New and Emerging Technologies and Networking, Systems, and Service Providers, with presentations from Ommatidia LiDAR’s Gregory Pandraud, vice president of Research, who spoke about 3-D structured light and sensing; Robert Keys, senior director,
Market Focus was more popular than ever.
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INDUSTRY FOCUS 2023/2024
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