Del Mar Photonics


OFC/NFOEC workshops provide opportunities to discuss and debate the latest technologies. Many workshops will be highly interactive, among both the speakers and the audience. The format of each session is determined by the organizers. In the past, many workshops have consisted of a series of short, contributed presentations (5 to 10 minutes) from people involved in the field followed by a panel discussion driven by questions from the audience.

This year the conference features workshops in current areas of interest in OFC and NFOEC categories alike. Details on all workshops are listed below. All OFC/NFOEC attendees are encouraged to participate. Workshops will be held on Sunday, February 24, 4:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m., and Monday, February 25, 8:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. The workshops provide an interactive learning environment and are open to all conference registrants.
Sunday, February 24, 4:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

OSuA — Is Optical Transmission Fiber a Commodity or is Further Innovation Required?
Organizers: Ming-Jun Li¹, Georg Mohs²; ¹Corning Inc., ²Tyco Telecommunications, USA.
Category 1. Fibers and Optical Propagation Effects — Room 5

After more than 30 years of advances in optical fiber and system technologies, is optical fiber a commodity today? If not, what technological advances are possible and what applications should they target? This workshop intends to discuss these two questions. It will feature invited talks from industry experts including fiber manufacturers, system suppliers and network operators as well as researchers from academia to present their views on:

* Is there a need for further innovations in optical fiber technology?
* What are the desired fiber attributes?
* Is there a market for photonic crystal fiber or other novel technology?
* What applications will drive new fiber designs?

The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion with the participation from the audience.

OSuB — Silicon Photonics Integrated Devices
Organizers: Haifeng Li; Tyco Telecommunications, USA.
Category 4. Switching, Wavelength-Selective Filtering and Routing Devices — Room 6B

Silicon Photonics, the technology of using standard silicon and CMOS manufacturing techniques to make optical devices, has become a reality with the current achievements in both the academic research and industrial development. With the high index contrast of SOI structure, silicon photonic devices can be made more than 10 times smaller than its conventional silica counterparts. By making the silicon photonic devices on top of CMOS circuits, the photonic devices can be seamlessly integrated with electronic driving circuit to achieve higher level of integration to further reduce the interconnection and packaging cost and improve operating speed. This workshop will focus on two general categories: 1) what can silicon photonics technology do? To explore new device structures and functions being realized by this technology, and 2) how can silicon photonics do it? To discuss the practical aspects of the technology, such as input/output coupling, and polarization diversity, etc.

Speakers include:

High Bandwidth Silicon Photonics Components Research, Andrew Alduino, Intel Corp., USA
Basics of Light Modulation and Off Chip Coupling in Micron-Scale Si Photonics, Mehdi Asghari, Kotura Inc, USA
Resonator-Based CMOS Compatible Optical Filters and Modulators, Douglas Gill, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
CMOS Photonics - Roadmap to $1/Gb, Cary Gunn, Luxtera, USA
Electrical Tuning of Dispersion in Silicon Waveguides, Bahram Jalali, Univ. of California at Los Angeles, USA
Wavelength Selective Elements on Silicon: Implementation and Applications, Siegfried Janz, Inst. for Microstructural Sciences, Natl. Res. Council Canada, Canada
High Speed Photonics on Silicon, Michal Lipson, Cornell Univ., USA
Advances in Silicon Microphotonics: From Telecom-Grade Filters to Light-Powered Micromachines, Milos Popovic, Res. Lab of Electronics, MIT, USA
Interfacing a Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit with the Outside World: Diffractive Grating Couplers, Gunther Roelkens, Photonics Res. Group, IMEC/Ghent Univ., Belgium
Hermetic Laser Sources for Silicon Photonics and Waveguide Devices, David Sherrer, Rohm & Haas, USA
Silicon Integrated Nanophotonics for On-Chip Interconnects, Yurii Vlasov, IBM Watson Res. Center, USA

OSuC — Planning Tools for Transparent Optical and Multilayer Networks
Organizers: Jane M. Simmons¹, Dion Leung², Claus Gruber³, Dominic Schupke³; ¹Monarch Network Architects, USA, ²Tellabs, USA, ³Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany.
Category 9. Networks — Room 6D

Optical networks have grown in size and complexity to the extent that design tools are an integral part of the design process. This is especially true for network designs based on optical-bypass technology and designs requiring optimization across multiple layers. This workshop will examine the current state of optical network design tools from several perspectives. Carriers will discuss what they look for in a design tool and how tools can be improved to meet their needs. System vendors and design-tool developers will discuss the major challenges of, and their approach to, developing algorithms to optimize transparent and multilayer networks. This will include a discussion of techniques that are a departure from traditional design methodologies. The speakers’ presentations will be followed by a panel discussion.

Speakers include:

Planning Tools: A Planner's Perspective, Scott Mountford, Network Planning & Advanced Services, AT&T Services, USA
Transport-Layer Aware Engineering of an IP Backbone, Martin Horneffer, Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany
Taking IP Layer Needs into Account during the Optical Layer Planning Process, Ori Gerstel, IPoDWDM Architecture, Cisco, USA
Constraints in Multilayer Optimization for IP Traffic over Optical WDM Networks, Detlef Stoll, Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany
Multilayer Design with a Grooming Layer over an Optical Layer, Raghu Ranganathan, Ciena Corporation, USA
Physical Layer Modeling for Network Configuration and Planning Tools, Paul Claisse, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
Network Planning for Dynamic Impairment Constraint Optical Networking: The Activities of DICONET EU Project, Ioannis Tomkos, DICONET Project Leader, AIT, Greece

OSuD — Optical Versus Electronic Techniques for Distortion Compensation
Organizer: Peter Winzer; Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, USA.
Category 3. Signal Measurement, Distortion Compensation Devices and Sensors — Room 6E

Recent developments in high-speed digital signal processing hardware have enabled powerful electronic impairment mitigation engines, such as 10-Gb/s maximum likelihood sequence estimation, 10-Gbaud electronic pre-distortion, and coherent detection with digital phase locking. In contrast to optical impairment mitigation techniques, which can simultaneously operate on multiple WDM channels and which can be distributed throughout the network in order to optimize fiber transmission performance, electronic techniques inherently work as lumped transponder elements and on a per-channel basis. This workshop will discuss the evolution of optical and electronic impairment mitigation methods and devices as well as their advantages and shortcomings in the light of optically-routed transport networks.

OSuE — The Roles of Electronics and Photonics in Signal Processing
Organizers: Rodney S. Tucker¹, Djan Khoe², David Miller³; ¹Univ. of Melbourne, Australia, ²Technical Univ. of Eindhoven, Netherlands, ³Stanford Univ., USA.
Category 8. Optical Processing and Analog Subsystems — Room 6F

The processing power of digital electronic circuits continues grow according to Moore’s law. But to maintain this growth, electronic chip designers are struggling against thermal limitations caused by energy dissipation in the devices and in interconnects between devices. The ultra-high bandwidth of optics, and the high switching speed in photonics devices based on nonlinear optics suggests that digital optical devices may eventually replace electronics in very high speed signal processing, especially in applications where the data to be processed is already in optical form. This workshop will explore the underlying issues that will determine the future roles of electronics and photonics in digital signal processing. Topics to be covered include power and energy considerations in electronics and photonics, processing speed, device integration issues, and intra-chip and inter-chip interconnects.

OSuF — Extended Reach PON and Central Office By-Pass
Organizer: Russell Dave; British Telecom, UK.
Category 10. Access Solutions, Demonstrations and Non-Telecom Applications — Room 7

FTTP is becoming a mainstream access technology, typified by large GEPON deployments in the Far East and BPON/GPON deployments in the USA. In Europe FTTP is largely confined to municipality and local initiatives with incumbent operators confining themselves mainly to new build/niche markets where FTTP is economically attractive. For FTTP to be viable as a mass-market replacement for xDSL both the capital expenditure and the operational cost of the complete end to end network must be reduced. Extending access network reach, bypassing Central Offices and Metro transmission networks, has become a topic of growing interest in the last few years. This workshop explores the latest thinking on Long Reach Access, its potential for cost reduction and progress towards realising commercially viable standards based solutions.

Extending the reach of PONs has been a research topic for some years and is now getting close to commercial application. In this workshop four major operators from around the worldwide will describe network applications and technical progress to date. Three vendors will then describe progress towards commercial products. Finally a major university will review technology challenges and compare architectures.

Speaker include:

Dan Grossman, Motorola
Patrick Iannone, AT&T
Fred Leonberger, EOvation Technologies LLC
Soo Jin Park, KT
David Piehler, Alphion
Albert Rafel, BT
Michael Rastovits-Wiech, Nokia Siemens Networks
Ken-Ichi Suzuki, NTT

NSuA — Packet/TDM Network Convergence: Opportunities and Challenges
Organizer: Bob Doverspike; AT&T Labs Res., USA.
NFOEC A. Optical Networks and Services — Room 8

Today by encapsulating packets into TDM payloads, links of packet networks are transported via TDM circuits and thus create “overlay networks” over the legacy SONET/SDH layer. In contrast, Ethernet is emerging as the preferred physical layer technology in the enterprise market and residential video network. However, TDM Private Lines (DS1 through OC-N) continue to be transported via SONET/SDH. Does Ethernet result in yet another overlay network or is there a simpler “converged” vision at the end of the tunnel that will transport all services? Will the converged network be Ethernet, WDM, or a hybrid? How will TDM Private Lines be transported over the converged network and what is the fate of the legacy TDM layer? This workshop will assemble top experts in the field to help answer these questions.

Speakers include:

Packet & TDM Networks: Convergence or Replacement? Mehran Esfandiari, Lead Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs
Optical Burst Transport: Enabling the Co-Existence of Packet and TDM Services in a Packet Optical Network, Luis Aguirre-Torres, Director of Technical Marketing, Matisse Networks
Using Ethernet for Ubiquitous Packet Transport Networks – What it Would Take? Gady Rosenfeld, Vice President Marketing, Corrigent Systems
Last Mile Packet/TDM Convergence, Ralph Ballart, Vice President, Portfolio Strategy, Alcatel/Lucent
Transport Network Evolution – TDM and Packet Services, Nabil Bitar, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Verizon
Packet Transport Evolution – Combining Ethernet Simplicity and Optical Transport Efficiency, Achim Autenrieth, Head of Innovation, IP Transport R&D Management, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia Siemens Networks
Emerging IP-over-WDM Architectures, Loukas Paraschis, Business Development Manager of Emerging Markets and Service Providers, Cisco Systems, Inc.

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Monday, February 25, 8:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.

OMA — Optical Parametric Amplifiers
Organizers: Colin J. McKinstrie¹, Stojan Radic²; ¹Lucent Technologies, USA, ²Univ. of California at San Diego, USA.
Category 2. Amplifiers and Lasers: Fiber or Waveguide — Room 5

Recent improvements in fiber manufacturing have enabled demonstrations of broad-bandwidth signal amplification, frequency conversion and phase conjugation by four-wave mixing in highly-nonlinear and micro-structured fibers. Other applications, such as amplitude and phase regeneration, sampling and switching, have also been demonstrated. A panel of leading researchers will review where the parametric-device community is, and discuss where it needs to go and how it should get there. The workshop will include time for a discussion, between the panel and the attendees, of future directions for fiber-based optical signal processing.

OMB — Ultimate High Spectral Efficiency: Towards the Shannon Limit
Organizers: Michel Joindot¹, Robert Tkach², Hoon Kim³; ¹ENSSAT, France, ²Alcatel-Lucent, USA, ³Samsung Electronics, Republic of Korea.
Category 6. Digital Transmission Systems — Room 6B

Following the path of radio some decades ago, today, research in optical communications is actively investigating “advanced” modulation formats, with the objective of increasing the spectral efficiency. This workshop will examine the most recent results, how they can be potentially and practically applicable, and what can be expected in the future. In addition to experimental results the workshop will consider the ultimate limits, imposed by information theory, taking into account the specific properties of the optical channel as compared to the classical radio channel in terms of capacity limits, system complexity, and optimization of the modulation constellations.

OMC — Optical/Wireless Integration for Enhanced Broadband Access and Transmission
Organizers:Steve Weistein¹, Ting Wang², Hussein Mouftah³, Sudhir Dixit4, Chunming Qiao5; ¹CTTC Services, USA, ²NEC Labs, USA, ³Univ. of Ottawa, Canada, 4Nokia Res., USA, 5SUNY at Buffalo, USA.
Cateogory 9. Networks — Room 6D

This light technical and business-oriented workshop, consisting of presentations by researchers, developers and network operators coupled with active discussion, addresses the integration of optical and wireless technologies and networks. It will clarify the service benefits and operational savings of a closer integration of wireless and optical systems and subsystems.

The topics include but are not limited to:

* FMC(Fixed-Mobile Convergence), architectures and trends integrating the metropolitan optical network with diverse broadband wireless access systems.
* More effective use of the public optical network as the backbone for cellular mobile, WiMAX and other wireless systems.
* IMS (IP multimedia subsystems), including QoS (quality of service) continuity between wireless and optical segments.
* Wireless systems combined with PON (passive optical network) for greater broadband access service flexibility and reliability.
* Network elements integrating radio, optical, and routing functions.
* Minimizing investment and operational costs through closer optical/wireless integration.
* "Radio-over-fiber" technologies and systems.
* Modulation technologies (such as OFDM) used in both wireless and optical subsystems, and other enabling technologies.

Speakers include:

Convergence of Broadband Optical and Wireless Access Networks, G. K Chang; Georgia Tech, USA
Radio-over-Multimode Fibre Networks, Ton Koonen; Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, Netherlands
Transport of Wireless Bandwidth over Ethernet Networks, Tod Sizer; Alcatel-Lucent, USA
Optical Network Technologies for Converged Broadband Fixed and Mobile Services, Masatoshi Suzuki; KDDI R&D Labs, Japan
Next Generation PON System for Access Service Integration, Akio Tajima; NEC Japan, Japan
Verizon's Optical Network Strategy, Willaim Uliasz; Verison, USA

OMD — All-Optical Signal Processing and Conditioning
Organizers: Benjamin J. Eggleton¹, Jürg Leuthold²; ¹Univ. of Sydney, Australia, ²Karlsruhe Univ., Germany.
Category 3. Signal Measurement, Distortion Compensation Devices and Sensors — Room 6E

This workshop will review state-of-the art all-optical signal processing technologies and address current research trends in the field of nonlinear optics. The workshop covers both second and third order nonlinear effects with an emphasis on technologies to implement these materials in novel devices for use in high-speed optical communication systems. The workshop will consist of three sessions dealing with different aspects of nonlinear all-optical signal processing technologies:

* Platforms for nonlinear devices;
* Novel material physics; and
* Applications.

The first session will focus on the different platforms that have been developed, e.g. HNLF, PCF, Silicon, PPLN, Chalcogenide and SOA and will attempt to develop Figures of Merit that characterizes the key performance aspects of these different platforms. The second session will consider the key physical processes underpinning these different nonlinear platforms, specifically the role and impact of free-carriers in semiconductors, two-photonic absorptive effects and will discussion phase matched and non-phase matched processes. Finally, the third session will consider the emerging applications in high speed optical communication systems and will attempt to establish a roadmap that connects the materials and platforms discussed in the earlier sessions with the applications, examples being optical regeneration, wave-length conversion, optical performance monitoring, optical switching and routing and optical logic.

OME — Can Optical Packet Switching Solve the Bottleneck Problem in Electronic Routers?
Organizers: Ken Ichi Kitayama¹, Keren Bergman²; ¹Osaka Univ., Japan, ²Columbia Univ., USA.
Category 7. Transmission Subsystems and Network Elements — Room 6F

There are growing concerns that throughput bottlenecks and the ever-increasing power consumption/footprint in electronic routers will eventually limit network capacity. Optical packet switching (OPS), in which optical packets are buffered and forwarded in optical form, and optical burst switching (OBS), in which buffers are completely eliminated, may provide solutions to this “electronic bottleneck.” This workshop will feature invited talks from different sectors to present views on outstanding issues in OPS and OBS, including; (i) capabilities, limitations, and future prospects of electronic routers, (ii) how far optical technologies such as optical interconnects, optical switching, and optical buffering can penetrate into electronic router architectures, (iii) new approaches to optical buffering, and (iv) whether OPS and OBS can be scaled up to realistic sizes.

OMF — Device Requirements for Advanced Modulation Formats
Organizers: Charles Joyner¹, Paul Morton²; ¹Infinera, USA, ²Morton Photonics, USA.
Category 5. Optoelectronic Devices — Room 7

Advanced modulation formats provide increased communication capacity and transmission distance, and are increasingly being used in experimental and deployed systems. This workshop will investigate methods for encoding and decoding data with amplitude, phase, and frequency; comparing maximum data rate, overall capacity and transmission distance. Candidates for comparison include: RZ, NRZ, duo-binary, DQPSK, PM-QPSK and coherent transmission. Systems expert speakers are encouraged to choose and defend methods that have the highest theoretical information capacity x distance product, with a practical implementation strategy. Device designers will speak on the relative difficulties of producing the more complex transmitters and receivers required for these advanced modulation formats. Following presentations, a panel discussion will highlight tradeoffs between performance, complexity and overall system cost for the various modulation formats.

NMA — Options for Optical Networks Routing Protocols Now and in the Future
Organizers: Jim Jones¹, Monica Lazer²; ¹Alcatel, USA, ²AT&T, USA.
NFOEC A. Optical Networks and Services — Room 8

A critical component in the optical control plane is development and testing of mature, interoperable routing protocols. This workshop will review the following topics:

* Technical requirements and high-level architecture for optical network routing.
* Progress of standards definition and interoperability trials:
o ITU-T has defined requirements and architecture for routing in Automatically Switched Optical Networks (ASON)
o IETF has defined extensions for ASON routing and has ongoing work for Path Computation Entity (PCE) and wavelength routing
o Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has conducted multi-vendor interoperability trials which has demonstrated optical routing protocols
* Overview of multi-vendor interoperability tests and lessons learned.
* Examples of carrier deployments of multi-domain routing.

This workshop will explore the current state and future direction of optical routing protocols.

Speakers include:

Greg Bernstein, Grotto Networking
Angela Chiu, AT&T Labs
Wataru Imajuku, NTT Network Innovation Labs
Lyndon Ong, Ciena
Jonathan Sadler, Tellabs
Mike Soulakis, Alcatel-Lucent

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NFOEC panel sessions provide interactive discussions focused on topics of interest to the industry.

NTuA — FTTX towards Gb/s per Subscriber
Organizer: William C. Uliasz; Verizon, USA.
NFOEC B. Network Technologies — Tuesday, February 26, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., Room 8

The deployment of FTTX based fiber access is growing rapidly and users are starting to request more bandwidth, richer applications and more control over the network they subscribe to. Broadcast video, interactive gaming, streaming video, and an ever increasing number of HDTV channels are accelerating the bandwidth requirements a distribution system must deliver. The recently ratified G984.5 contains options for adding wavelengths that would co-exist with the current GPON architecture. In addition, other technologies are being developed or optimized to improve network performance, simplify equipment installation, and reduce costs. This panel will examine industry trends and technology advancements relating to G-PON, 10G-PON and WDM-PON systems. Many real world issues faced in building a carrier access network will be discussed.

NWB — IPTV and Video Deployment Architectures and Implementations
Organizer: Zouheir Mansourati; Telus, Canada.
NFOEC A. Optical Networks and Services — Wednesday, February 27, 8:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m., Room 9

While circumstances of various incumbent service providers may differ, their goals for IPTV and video are the same: minimizing total cost of ownership and ensuring that current deployments are scalable enough to satisfy the bandwidth requirements of future applications. In this session, we will explore the strategies and tactics followed by various service providers in the architecture and implementation of their current or future IPTV and Video deployments with emphasis on the following topics:

* Market conditions: triple or quadruple play, Brownfield or Greenfield;
* Services: HDTV, PVR, nPVR, and VoD;
* Architectures: switched or broadcast; multicast or unicast;
* Access infrastructure: FTTx, xDSL, or combination thereof;

Panel members will share their own experience and draw the lessons they learned from recent deployments.

Speakers include:

Joe Huggins; Director, Access and Transport Technology Management, Qwest Communications, USA
Tim Fell; Director, Broadband Services Development TELUS Communications Inc., USA
Jeff Weber; AT&T, USA
Patrick Case; RealPage, Inc., USA

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