It has been a long-time goal of photonics to develop integrated circuits that parallel, to some extent, the successes of Si CMOS integrated circuits. Fundamental limitations as well as materials issues and market factors have slowed the emergence of photonic circuits with multiple functionalities and high component counts.

Recently, however, there have been significant breakthroughs in both InP- and Si-based platforms. Heterogeneous combinations of these technologies have also shown promise. This has been driven by numerous factors including Internet data demands, the push for higher performance and, simultaneously, lower cost, and the maturation of sophisticated design and fabrication technologies. This symposium will review the state of the art in this field and project evolutionary paths. The issue of whether the two primary materials approaches will compete or merge will also be addressed

The symposium will focus on real-time implementation of digital signal processing (DSP) from 10Gbit/s to 100GbE data rates, with the first session of the symposium focusing on the technology for real-time implementation, and the second session focusing on applications of DSP. In order to apply DSP at 10Gbit/s and beyond in CMOS, a highly parallel architecture is required, which in turn presents challenges for implementation. Nevertheless DSP has become a disruptive technology for optical transceivers due to advancements in microelectronics. While the DSP may be realized using a custom application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), much of the focus of the symposium will be on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), since their processing power is now approaching that required for prototyping of architectures and algorithms.

The FPGA market is dominated by two manufacturers, Xilinx and Altera, and therefore in order to contrast the salient features the symposium will feature a case study of implementing framing and FEC for 100GbE systems using the two platforms, which will conclude the technology half of the symposium.  In the second half of the symposium four applications of high speed DSP will be considered, for both conventional direct detection systems as well as next generation digital coherent communication systems.

GPON and GE-PON and point-to-point fibre are now being deployed and can deliver ~100 Mbit/s to end users.  In parallel next generation technologies are being developed such as 10 Gbit/s PONs and WDM-PONs.  Unless the industry identifies a killer application causing end-users to pay extra revenue for bandwidths higher than can be delivered today, then the cost of future optical access technologies must be comparable to the technologies available today.   This is a significant challenge and should be a major focus for the optical research community.   This symposium will:

- Discuss drivers for next generation optical access technology
- Compare capability, cost and power consumption of candidate next generation PON architectures (10Gbit/s PON, WDM-PON etc.) versus each other and versus GPON/GE-PON and point-to-point Discuss enabling optical component technology for next generation optical access with a focus on cost reduction.