Status of High-Speed POF In the AI Era

Yasuhiro Koike, Director, Keio Photonics Research Institute (KPRI) and Professor, Keio University, Japan

Yasuhiro Koike is highly regarded internationally as the inventor of Graded-Index Plastic Optical fiber (GI POF). He also invented Zero Birefringent Polymer and Super Birefringent Polymer which have been used in major LCD TVs. He was a Core Researcher of the research project of Face-to-Face Communication system based on the above mentioned technologies on the FIRST Program which was initiated by the Cabinet Office of Japan in 2014. 

He has been the General Chair of International POF Conference since 1992. He was conferred as an Honorary Doctorate of Eindhoven University of Technology in 2007. He is a recipient of International Engineering and Technology Award of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), the Fujiwara Award, and Medal with Purple Ribbon awarded by Emperor of Japan, SID Special Recognition Award, etc.

Potential Market Opportunities for Polymer Optical Fibers

A potential great market for POF is copper cable replacement in the data center using commercial VCSELs. Cole will outline the requirements and compare to competing technologies including electrical linear redrivers for copper cable extension, SiPIC, uLED and THz RF.

Chris Cole
Advisor, Coherent Corp.
Past Chair of OFC, IEEE Fellow, OPTICA Fellow

Chris is contributing to optics product development at Coherent, Eridu AI, Lucidean, Bright Si Tech, Applied Materials, Quintessent, and Hyperlight. He was an advisor to Nubis Communications, Yamaichi, Avicena, and Ayar Labs. Previously he was Vice President, Systems Engineering, at an ML start-up investigating optical computing. Prior, he was Vice President, Advanced Development, Finisar Corp. (acquired by Coherent/II-VI) where he architected and led the development of 40, 50, 100, 200 and 400 Gb/s Ethernet optical transceivers for Cloud Data Centers (DCs), and Carrier Central Offices (COs), leading to over $1 billion of Finisar and billions of optics industry revenue. These are used in high speed optical links in every Cloud and large Enterprise DC, and Carrier CO.

Chris is an IEEE Fellow, elected in 2017 for "contributions to 10, 40, and 100G Optical Ethernet and OTN interfaces," and an OPTICA Fellow (formerly Optical Society of America), elected in 2021 for "pioneering contributions to architectures, specifications, standardization, and product development of 10, 40, 100, 200 and 400G optical interfaces.” He is past chair of OFC, and has over 300 articles, presentations, lectures and patents in the areas of optics, communications, signal processing, integrated circuits, and ultrasound.