Technologies for a petabit network

New services and the evolution to a multimedia broadband internet are constantly requesting more bandwidth. Currently the data traffic doubles every year without having any saturation in sight. Increasing numbers of FTTx ports will lead to a global core network with petabit traffic, offering 10 Gbit/s access for everybody and everywhere. Supporting this data rate growth is an enormous challenge for the photonic components involved on the transmitter and receiver side. Todaypsilas inversed pricing structure - one 40 G transceiver is much more expensive than forty 1 G transceivers - shows that there is not yet an equilibrium between industry demand and component performance. In addition, the migration from todaypsilas dominating intensity modulation to combined phase and amplitude modulation at reasonable component cost requires mass introduction of new technologies with monolithic and / or hybrid integration, silicon photonics and several new device concepts. The next ten years in the system and component segment will be an exciting area, where excellence in technology and performance will again be as important as excellence in managing the manufacturing costs and energy efficiency. Based on the experiences gained from telecom industry photonics will play a major role in biomedical and health care applications as well as in complex security monitoring and surveillance systems.