ECOC celebrates its 50th anniversary

• The European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
• The conference and exhibition will take place in Frankfurt, Germany, from September 22-26.
• Key themes at the show include satellite optical communication, artificial intelligence, networking for AI within the data centre, photonic integration, quantum and Green ICT. 

ECOC will celebrate its 50th anniversary this month.

Professor Carmen Mas MachucaThe event will include a special session highlighting the progress made in photonics over the last half century and will feature luminary speakers. 

 There will also be a celebratory event with food stalls from different countries. 

“There will be an opportunity to mingle, and we also plan an exhibition to look back at what has been achieved combined with what directions we need to take for the future,” says Jörg-Peter Elbers, an ECOC General Chair this year. 

“Photonics is now very important for digitalising different protocols,” adds Ronald Freund, another of the General Chairs. “It is not just telecommunications but also photonic networks for the industrial production of almost anything you can imagine.”  

Conference themes

The use of photonics for communications has become so diverse that no one theme captures the show. Rather, the General Chairs highlight several themes at this year’s event.

“There are hot topics that we have tried to cover, while also recognising that we have a broad audience,” says Elbers. The audience ranges from communications service providers to component makers and chip foundry operators.

“One topic is satellite network integration in the optical domain,” says Professor Carmen Mas Machuca, the third ECOC General Chair. “Satellite networks using all this optical technology is one of the new topics.”

There is ongoing research work to combine terrestrial and space networks to address capacity gaps and bolster networking resiliency. Satellite can take over for any failures in the terrestrial core network. Satellite networks also offer latency benefits which can benefit niche applications like high-frequency trading.

Combining satellite and terrestrial networks represents a tremendous opportunity but has it challenges, says Elbers. An optical satellite symposium will be hosted at ECOC.

Ronald Freund

Another topic is sensing that will be addressed in multiple sessions. Examples include using optical fibre network for sensing, to wearables such as brain-computer interfaces (see Conference keynotes, next section).

Freund highlights other networking symposia addressing the data centre, and Green ICT. “How photonics can contribute to reach net zero targets,” says Freund.

“We wanted to highlight the breadth of the topic, how many different problems we can solve with optical technologies,” says Elbers."

Conference keynotes 

ECOC will feature four keynote speakers.

This year, the topics are AI interconnect requirements in the data centre, optical networking, past and future, for telecom, silicon photonics, and using photonics for computation.

• Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder and Chief Architect at Arista Networks, will address whether interconnects can keep up with the demands of AI. Bechtolsheim will outline ways to improve the power, cost, and reliability of optics for interconnects needed for AI, the boundaries between copper and optics, and packaging innovations.

• Thomas van Briel is the Senior Vice President of Architecture and Strategy at the communications service provider Deutsche Telekom. His will address the evolution of IP and optical networks and the technologies that have driven and will drive optical networking.

• Roel Baets is an Emeritus Professor at Ghent University and former Group Leader at imec. His talk is on ‘Silicon Photonics 4.0’.  If the title puzzles you, then it is well chosen, quips Professor Baets. "What I mean is that it will be important for silicon photonics to make use of smart and agile manufacturing, a notion associated with Industry 4.0," says Baets. "Silicon photonics can be expected to be an enabling technology for Industry 4.0 since it can enable more performant AI, sensors for IoT, and more." 

• The final speaker is Joyce Poon, Head of Photonics Architecture at Lightmatter. She will address future computing examples involving integrated photonics. Lightmatter believes the most significant opportunities and challenges in computing lie at the extremes in size and scale: large data centres and personal devices. Poon will detail how advanced integrated photonics can transform computing, from making large-scale AI systems more efficient to enabling wearables and human brain-computer interfaces.

Rump Session

This year’s Rump Session is titled: Quantum Technologies: Research hype or on track to commercial success?

Jörg-Peter Elbers

The Rump Session will look at the funding Quantum players are attracting and address what financial return, if any, has been achieved.  The topics to be tackled include quantum secure communications and quantum computing. 

“Quantum companies are mushrooming everywhere, with Europe maybe an extreme case,” says Elbers. “It is interesting to explore what is behind this and what happens if the funding dries up?”

The session will address what is real and ready for near-term commercial deployment and what remains longer term.

Individual interests

Each Chair has their own ECOC interests regarding the latest research. 

“My interest is to see how the energy bottleneck in the data centre will be solved concerning the demands of the AI processors,” says Freund. “One interesting approach is to move forward with integration, for instance, co-packaged optics and whether there are other possibilities.”

Professor Mas Machuca is interested in network security. “How can we use all these entanglement properties [to detect eavesdropping] so they can be applied in real networks?” she says. “For now, they are far from deployment, and it will be interesting to see how far it can go.”  

The challenges with entanglement are the limited distances and durations achieved, measured in milliseconds, says Professor Mas Machuca.

Elbers's hot topic is photonic integration: “The progress here has been tremendous.” What interests him is how to bring the functional blocks closer and building new functions using chiplets, for example.

Another of his interests at the show is how generative AI can be ued to enable customers to operate their networks more efficiently.  

Industry issues

What are the Chairs’ concerns and observations regarding the photonics industry?

For Europe, there is a gap between research and forming of companies, says Freund. There is progress but more momentum is needed for start-ups to transfer innovation from research into applications so that smaller companies can provide solutions for larger ones.

“There's a lot of money around, but there also has to be the people -  entrepreneurs - to do that,” says Freund.

Professor Mas Machuca highlights sovereignty issues such that telecom operators in Europe have the suppliers to guarantee working networks. “How to design your network so that if one manufacturer is banned from your country, you still have an operating network,” says Professor Mas Machuca.

It requires standardisation efforts that the equipment makers must follow to ensure interoperability. “This is always a challenge,” she says.

Elbers overall is positive but does highlight challenges. The fundamental drivers remain: traffic growth is continuing while there are government investments to promote broadband in rural areas.

But there are also geopolitical issues that are forcing the telecom operators to chose carefully their suppliers. These geopolitical issues are also forcing equipment vendors to focus on particular markets.

There is also equipment-maker consolidation taking place, the recent Nokia-Infinera announcement being an example.

“That certainly brings challenges for some people, but I think it also brings opportunities for others,” says Elbers.

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This year's ECOC General Chairs

Carmen Mas Machuca is the Professor of Communication Networks at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University of the Bundeswehr, Munich. Her interests include network planning, resource allocation, and resiliency of telecom networks, not just core but also access networks.

Jörg-Peter Elbers is Senior VP, Advanced Technology, Standards and IPR, at Adtran Networks. His responsibilities cover optical packet networks, optical access, and residential gateways.

As passive optical network speeds rise to 50 gigabit-per-second and beyond, there is a blurring between access, aggregation, and metro regional networks, says Elbers. There is also the growing importance of photonic integration as part of system design and this is also impacting his work interests.

Ronald Freund heads the telecommunications systems group at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), Germany. The HHI is the largest applied research organization in Europe.

Freund’s group research interests span the full spectrum of networks - from in-house, access, and metro to wide area networks. A key focus of research is fibre-based communications to advance reach, capacity, and data rates, as well as network security and power consumption issues. The group has also started to address optical satellite and optical free-space communications.