OFC Hot Topics: Coherent Moving to the Data Center and More

By Lisa Crewe | Posted on March 8, 2018

ofc conference

March 11-15, 2018, Acacia Communications will join the industry’s brightest thought leaders in optical fiber communication at the 2018 Optical Networking and Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC) at the San Diego Convention Center. It’s a great opportunity to discuss what is driving next-generation technology and innovation within the optical communications space.

Our presence at OFC 2018 will be stronger than ever. Members of our team will facilitate sessions covering topics such as coherent for shorter reach applications, 400G and beyond, and silicon integration.

We think one of the hot topics at the show will be coherent evolving to shorter distances inside the data center.  As an example, cloud architectures are evolving and driving demand for high-capacity optical interconnects between data centers. Hear our own Chris Doerr’s take on the issue at the “Rump Session: When will Coherent Replace Direct Detection in the Data Center?

Additionally, this year Acacia will be sponsoring Theater III at the OFC conference, which will host presentations and panels throughout the conference including our panel session on Wednesday from 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. titled Next Generation Coherent: Architectures and Technologies.  The session will feature Jörg-Peter Elbers, SVP at ADVA, Tad Hofmeister, Network Architect with Google and our own Chris Doerr and Christian Rasmussen.  The panel will be moderated by Acacia’s Tom Williams.

For a full run down of when and where our team is speaking, check out the schedule below.

Sunday, March 11

  • 12:30 – 3:30 p.m. – Markus Weber, senior director of product lifecycle management, will participate in a workshop on “DSP for Short Reach and Client Optics – What Makes Sense?”
  • 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. – Benny Mikkelsen, founder and chief technology officer, will present a short course on “100 Gb/s and Beyond Transmission Systems, Design and Design Trade-offs.”
  • 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. – Chris Doerr, associate vice president of integrated photonics, will present a short course on “Highly Integrated Monolithic Photonic Integrated Circuits.”
  • 4:00 – 6:30 p.m. – Christian Rasmussen, founder and vice president of digital signal processing and optics, will be participating in a workshop titled “When Will We Need to Scale the Fiber Capacity? What is the Realistic Approach?”
  • 4:00 – 6:30 p.m. – Hongbin Zhang, principal DSP designer, will participate in a workshop on “Field Trials: Is It Make or Break for Innovative Technologies.”
  • 8:00 – 10:00 p.m. – BinBin Guan, optical engineer in silicon photonics, will host a Lab Automation Hackathon

Monday, March 12

Tuesday, March 13

Wednesday, March 14

  • 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. – Chris Doerr, Christian Rasmussen and Tom Williams will present a show floor program in Theater III entitled “Next Generation Coherent: Architectures and Technologies.”

Thursday, March 15

  • 9:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Christian Rasmussen to present an invited paper entitled “Power Efficient DSP and Optical Integration”
  • 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. – Tom Williams will present in a show floor program in Theater II on “400G Coherent: What Does it Mean to You?”

We look forward to hearing insightful perspectives and sharing our thoughts on these topics. Join us! Registration is still open.

If you are interested in meeting with Acacia during the conference, please contact marketing@acacia-inc.com.  We hope to see you there!