ECOC 2024 MARKET FOCUS
ECOC 2024 MARKET FOCUS
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Market Focus 2024 was yet another roaring success, with a wide range of presentations and discussions. This ECOC staple brought together people from every part of the industry to hear about the latest ideas and developments. Below are just a few of the many highlights of this year’s event. T he big theme from the show floor perspective was supported by presentations at the Market Focus sessions. Initial talks suppliers, and this seems to be gaining some attention for the Tbps data rates everyone is looking towards. Source photonics showed excellent progress with 800Gbps and 1.6Gbps
to double up data rates using their integrated optical equaliser while others such as Pilot Photonics conveyed the exciting progress with comb laser arrays. A number of speakers led by Mark Nowell and Karl Glass discussed the metrics of standards that support the AI/ML trends for datacenter operators and how optics can support the drive to higher data rates and lower power consumption. A growing interest has been taking coherent protocols to the edge of the network with companies such as Adtran, Cohere, Cisco, Ciena all exploring what would be the best strategy to
from a broad range of speakers and companies focused on modules and subsystems and was led by Michael Lebby of Lightwave Logic who showed polymer silicon slot modulators with reliability data operating at 200Gbps with less than 1V drive with initial results of polymer-plasmonic modulators operating with open 400Gbps eyes. While 400Gbps lanes are still on the roadmap, on the show floor there were many discussions in what technologies could really reach this level of performance, especially from a modulator standpoint. Polymer- plasmonic based modulators seem to be the natural leader now with optical bandwidths in excess of 500GHz. Open Light photonics discussed their work to integrate InP with silicon photonics which has come a long way over the past few years. Mark Lutkowitz focused on whether co-packaged optics really was a platform with staying power, and focused on the incumbent pluggable markets. While incumbent technologies are difficult to displace unless there is a better solution, there is an emerging area of co-packaged pluggables that is gaining interest among various
pluggable transceivers while Intel displayed progress towards onboard very short, chip level distance optical interconnects using their silicon photonics platform. While progress was impressive, the reach of silicon photonics modulators for 200Gbps and beyond was a factor that many at the show floor were concerned about. NewPhotonics discussed how
It was standing room only at this year’s Market Focus.
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INDUSTRY FOCUS 2024/2025
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