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The Optical Fiber Conference and Exposition (OFC), held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, has concluded with 663 exhibiting companies, over 1,100 peer-reviewed papers and 14,500 attendees. The conference and exhibition connects the industry’s leaders and business professionals to discuss optical innovations for future networking growth segments such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and much more.

Technical presentations and the “Market Watch” programs drew thought leaders from across the industry. These researchers and industry experts explored numerous global trends, including advances in coherent technologies, developments in the data center and higher capacity product platforms. The attendance to the conference’s short courses designed to educate early professionals and laypersons on the more technical aspects of the field and spanning diverging topics spurring the industry growth, increased by 30 percent this year.

This year’s exhibit floor and conference featured global leaders, diverse programming, interactive workshops and unique technical sessions. OFC exhibitors made more than 140 product, service and partner announcements, including technical advancements in SDN, 200G WDM, 25G Ethernet optics and 5G mobile network enablement.

Researchers from around the world presented industry leading technical peer-reviewed papers, including:

• Better By the Dozen: Highest Core Density Realized with 12 Core Single-Mode Optical Fiber - Achieving an industry high 12-cores within a single-mode optical fiber research team from NTT develop a new fiber design which will work to bring us closer to meeting the needs of a Big Data future
• Making the Switch to Polarization Diversity - A new silicon-photonic chip from Japan’s AIST paves the way to truly integrated polarization-insensitive switches
• Optimizing Data Center Placement and Network Design to Strengthen Cloud Computing - Nokia-Bell Labs group has developed a mathematical model that offers improvements to the flow of internet traffic generated by cloud computing while optimizing data center placement
• The Golden Link: Plasmonic Device Offers Broadband Modulation to Optical Links at 100Gbit/s - A microscale modulator using plasmonically active gold components developed by ETH Zurich, demonstrates fast operation for ultra-broadband signals