Integrated photonics is approaching a critical inflection point where the main barrier to large-scale adoption is no longer device performance, but workflow maturity. In contrast to microelectronics — where highly developed modeling, standardized PDKs, and tightly integrated design-to-packaging flows enable first-time-right silicon — photonics still lacks the predictive accuracy, tool integration, and accessibility needed for rapid prototyping and fast iteration. This workshop will explore how to mature photonic workflows toward microelectronics-like streamlining, with a focus on multi-physics modeling, electronic–photonic co-design, scalable packaging, and the emerging role of programmable photonics as a path to faster validation, reconfigurability, and system-level optimization.

Free-space optical (FSO) communications are emerging as a key technology for next-generation satellite systems, enabling high-capacity, low-latency links beyond legacy RF systems. However, atmospheric turbulence severely limits optical communication links, in particular ground-to-space uplinks, requiring advanced mitigation techniques spanning system design, adaptive optics, diversity, coding, and coherent digital processing. This workshop brings together solution providers and end users to address application requirements, review state-of-the-art mitigation strategies, and define a technology roadmap for reliable, 100+ Gbps optical space–ground networks.

AI-driven workloads and growing access-network demands are rapidly increasing energy consumption and stressing the scalability of today’s network infrastructures. This workshop examines how deployable optical and photonic solutions—such as high-capacity AI interconnects, energy-efficient coherent access technologies, low-power DSP, and coordinated network-compute management—can reduce operational costs while meeting performance and sustainability targets. Bringing together experts from academia, industry, and operators, the workshop will define key technological pathways toward sustainable AI data centers and access networks.

Description:
The growth of AI and global connectivity is driving unprecedented demands, pushing both data centers and access networks to their energy and performance limits. Training large AI models requires massive computational power, while expanding access networks must handle higher capacities without increasing energy consumption.
Optical access networks have already adopted various energy-saving mechanisms, such as ONU sleep and doze modes, to reduce their carbon footprint. Nevertheless, emerging trends are shifting the landscape. The possible adoption of coherent technologies and the associated digital signal processing (DSP) requirements are expected to significantly raise power consumption, especially as access networks scale to higher capacities and wider deployment.
At the same time, the energy and resource consumption of AI-based data centers is rapidly growing due to the unprecedented computational power required for training and running complex models, particularly generative AI. As generative AI models (LLMs) push the boundaries of complexity, the traditional data center is rapidly evolving into the AI Factory. Training these massive LLMs requires thousands of GPUs/Accelerators to communicate and exchange unprecedented amounts of data, placing immense pressure on the underlying infrastructure and consuming significantly more energy than traditional server chips. This rapid scaling imposes multiple challenges on AI data centers, ranging from network bottlenecks (supported capacity and latency) to the optimization of computing resources, and long-term sustainability. To meet these demands, photonic technologies are essential in paving the way towards scalable AI infrastructure.
The impact of both access and data centers networks on overall energy and resource consumption is thus expected to significantly increase in the near future.
This comes at a critical moment when 107 countries, responsible for approximately 82% of global greenhouse gas emissions, have pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, following the commitments of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the EU’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels.
Considering all this, AI has a tremendous impact on our society and is challenging the scientific community. What and how joint technological efforts can respond to the challenge?
This workshop explores how optical and photonic innovations—spanning high-bandwidth AI interconnects, coherent and energy-efficient access technologies, low-power DSP, and advanced sleep/doze mechanisms, joint network and computing orchestration—can enable greener and scalable infrastructures.
Experts from academia, industry, and operators will discuss integrated hardware, software, and architectural solutions that reduce energy consumption while ensuring high performance. Join us to shape the roadmap for sustainable and future-proof AI data centers and access networks.

The combination of fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) with Wi-Fi is an enabler for high-performance wireless indoor access in households and industries. We will discuss recent developments of next-generation optical in-building networks with a focus on the vast range of often overlooked benefits beyond higher data rates. The workshop addresses the increasingly critical in-building network segment, where over 80% of all data traffic is consumed and generated. It focuses on quality of experience, reliability, low latency, and the growing needs of AI and non-AI services across homes, enterprises, and dense indoor venues. Fiber-to-the-Room (FTTR) and Fiber-to-the-Machine (FTTM) are key enablers for high-performance, energy-efficient indoor networks. The discussion also covers coordination of Wi-Fi, millimeter-wave, and LiFi technologies, as well as centralized control for better mobility, resource management, and interference handling. Participants will gain practical insight into technical, economic, and environmental aspects of in-building networks, including deployment challenges, future trends, and real-world case studies.

References
[1] Deloitte Broadband Consumer Survey 2025
[2] ETSI GS F5G 023 V1.1.1 (2024-09)

Agenda:

This workshop aims to share emerging objectives driven by the power limitations of future optical communication systems—from AI clusters to submarine networks—and to discuss potential technological breakthroughs.

The integration of lasers remains a significant challenge in the most scalable PICs such as Si, SiN, TFLN. In most cases, these platforms need external lasers, as on-chip lasers have yet to match the performance of discrete counterparts. Yet, as additional functionalities on the light sources are required for different applications, their integration onto PICs could be a driver for wide market adoption and cost reduction. This workshop brings a pool of experts who will discuss on one part their application needs and on the other part how different laser architectures and underlying integration technologies could meet their requirements.

Quantum communication, and more precisely quantum key distribution (QKD), has started revolutionizing secure communication over optical networks. But despite rapid progress, quantum communication remains fundamentally limited in point-to-point range due to photon loss. This workshop aims at gathering some of the world-leading actors in the rapidly evolving field of quantum repeaters, which promise overcoming this limitation.

AI-native automation and digital-twin technologies for optical networks depend on access to diverse, high-quality, and trustworthy telemetry. However, today’s data remains siloed across vendors, operators, and research testbeds, limiting reproducibility and slowing progress toward interoperable AI-driven network control. Emerging concepts such as data spaces, sovereign data sharing, and federated learning offer a path to unlock collaboration without centralizing sensitive operational data.
This workshop explores whether global or federated optical testbeds can serve as the backbone of a telco data-space ecosystem, enabling reliable AI models, cross-domain digital twins, and scalable simulation capabilities. Moreover, it aims to identify reference architectures, interoperability requirements, and governance models that could enable a federated, AI-ready optical testbed ecosystem.

As hyperscalers deploy AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale, they require optical connectivity across a broad spectrum of applications, from intra-data-center GPU fabrics and optical circuit switches to inter-DC links, metro networks, and long-haul interconnects. Each application imposes distinct requirements on bandwidth, reach, latency, power consumption, and cost, driving the need for a diverse portfolio of specialized pluggable transceivers. This workshop brings together market analysts, hyperscalers, silicon vendors, and optical module designers, alongside academic researchers exploring novel photonic signal processing solutions, to examine the challenges and design trade-offs shaping next-generation pluggables from 800G through 1.6T to 3.2T and beyond.

Agenda:

The rapid growth of AI-driven applications demands a high-performance, scalable, and flexible infrastructure spanning all network segments: data center interconnection, (intra-)data center networks, and data center access. How will those 3 segments architecturally and operationally evolve, and possibly converge, to satisfy the new requirements incurred by AI workloads?

Agenda:

Hollow-core fibers (HCFs) promise a step change in optical communications by enabling unrepeatered transmission beyond the limits of silica-core fiber. This workshop examines the technical breakthroughs required to reach ~1000 km unrepeatered links and evaluates the potential impact on terrestrial and submarine network architectures. Participants will gain insights from leading experts across fiber design, amplifiers, systems, and DSP innovations.

The evolution toward 6G demands more than incremental improvements — it requires rethinking how radio, optical, and data systems work together at the network edge. This workshop introduces the concept of confluent networks, where heterogeneous signals integrate natively end-to-end to meet the ultra-high data rates, low latency, and resilience requirements of tomorrow's applications. Through a mix of academic and industry perspectives, we critically examine the technologies, architectures, and open challenges that will define the path from today's converged networks to true confluence.

The first VHSP Supplement was agreed by the ITU-T in October 2025 and the ITU-T is continuing to evaluate candidate technologies for next-generation PON systems. Recently, hybrid DD/coherent architectures - combining direct and coherent detection aspects within the same system - have emerged as an interesting but under-studied option compared to the established pure IMDD and pure coherent approaches. This workshop will bring together proponents of hybrid, IMDD-only, and coherent-only solutions to create a lively and technically substantive debate.

This workshop will explore the future of optical communication channels, debating whether the trend towards fast narrow channels can continue indefinitely or if a shift towards slower, wider channels will become dominant. We will discuss the technical and economic factors influencing this evolution, including advancements in modulation formats, signal processing, and the changing demands of data traffic. Participants will gain insights into the potential trajectories of channel development and their implications for network design and performance.

Telecom fiber networks are emerging as large-scale sensors enabling detection of earthquakes, deep-ocean tsunamis and microseismic activity. This workshop brings together photonics engineers and geoscientists to examine the suitability of distributed acoustic and polarization-based sensing for early warning, event localization and industrial monitoring applications such as carbon capture and storage. The session will critically assess the realistic capabilities and limitations of using existing telecom infrastructure for seismic monitoring.

For decades, single-mode fibre (SMF) has been the backbone of global optical communication networks. Emerging technologies — including hollow-core fibre, free-space optical links, and space-division multiplexing (SDM) — are now reshaping this landscape. This workshop will explore how these technologies can be deployed, how they will coexist with legacy SMF infrastructure, and the technical, economic, and standardisation challenges involved in building unified heterogeneous networks.

The session will examine questions such as:

• How can new fibre and free-space technologies be integrated into existing network topologies?
• Which deployment scenarios (long-haul, metro, access, data-centre interconnects) are likely to adopt them first?
• What challenges arise in interoperability, cost, scalability, and network management?