OFC 2025: reflecting on the busiest optics show in years

Adtran's Gareth Spence interviews Omdia's Daryl Inniss (left) and the editor of Gazettabyte, live from the conference hall at OFC 2025. 

The discussion covers the hot topics of the show and where the industry is headed next. Click here.

OFC: After the aliens, a decade to rewire the Earth

At the OFC 2025 Rump Session, held in San Francisco, three teams were set a weighty challenge. If a catastrophic event—a visit by aliens —caused the destruction of the global telecommunications network, how would each team’s ‘superheroes’ go about designing the replacement network? What technologies would they use? And what issues must be considered?

 Source: Team A

The Rump Session tackled a provocative thought experiment. If the Earth's entire communication infrastructure vanished overnight, how would the teams go about rebuilding it?

Twelve experts - eleven from industry and one academic - were split into three teams.

The teams were given ten years to build their vision network. A decade was chosen as it is a pragmatic timescale and would allow the teams to consider using emerging technologies.

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oDAC: Boosting data centre speeds with less power

Academics have developed an optical digital-to-analogue converter (oDAC) that promises to rethink how high-speed optical transmission is done.

Professor Ioannis Tomkos

Conceived under the European Commission-funded Flex-Scale project for 6G front-haul, the oDAC also promises terabit links inside the data centre.

The oDAC is expected to deliver a 40 per cent power savings for a 1.6 terabit optical transmitter, which is the ‘send’ path of an optical module.

“It might not be not 50 or 60 per cent, but in this field, even a 25 per cent power saving turns heads,” says Ioannis Tomkos, a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece, one of the researchers leading the work.

The first proof-of-concept oDAC photonic integrated circuit (PIC) has sent 250 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a single wavelength as part of the European Proteus programme.

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Adtran broadens its OLS and access module offerings

Adtran has unveiled two products before the OFC show in San Francisco taking place at the end of the month. 

One is a 50 gigabit-per second (Gbps) SFP56 optical transceiver that uses 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) for 5G front-haul and enhanced broadband applications.  

The second product is the FSP 3000 IP OLS, a compact open line system (OLS) designed for point-to-point links between sites 120km apart. 

The OLS has been developed to simplify the setting up of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical links.    

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Silicon photonics grapples with 3D packaging demands

Hesham Taha (pictured), CEO of start-up Teramount, is more upbeat about silicon photonics than ever. But, as he outlines, challenges remain.

Hesham Taha is putting in the miles. The CEO of Teramount has been travelling to the East and West to meet with companies.

Termount is working closely with customers and partners adopting its technology that adds fibre to silicon photonics chips. 

"We're shipping units to customers and partners, and we need to be close to them as they integrate our components and address the challenges of integration," says Taha.

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Broadcom’s silicon for the PCI Express 6.0 era

Broadcom has detailed its first silicon for the sixth generation of the PCI Express (PCIe 6.0) bus, developed with AI servers in mind.

Sreenivas Bagalkote

The two types of PCIe 6.0 devices are a switch chip and a retimer.

Broadcom, working with Teledyne LeCroy, is also making available an interoperability development platform to aid engineers adopting the PCIe 6.0 standard as part of their systrems.

Compute servers for AI are placing new demands on the PCIe bus. The standard no longer about connects CPUs to peripherals but also serving the communication needs of AI accelerator chips.

“AI servers have become a lot more complicated, and connectivity is now very important,” says Sreenivas Bagalkote, Broadcom’s product line manager for the data center solutions group.

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Podcast: Reflections on the upcoming OFC 2025

Click here for the podcast