Once again Cadence and Lumerical are hosting the two-day Photonics Summit and Workshop. The two events are not interdependent, you can attend either or both. However, they do have a common theme: The Convergence of RF and Photonics. 5G, and especially millimeter wave, requires large numbers of small basestations every few hundred feet (each streetlight, or all around an exhibition center, for example). For economical buildout, one of the ways of doing this is to put just antennas and minimal electronics in the small basestation, with fiber fronthaul to a Cloud RAN basestation that does signal processing for a whole cohort of small basestations. (For more details of this application, see my post Why is 5G Such a Big Deal?) Here's one image from that post that shows how all the basestations, radios, and optical links fit together.

You can see my summary of last year's Photonics Summit, which was held on the Indian Diwali holiday: Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights...and Photonics, the Silicon Festival of Light.

The Summit

The summit will take place in Cadence's Building 10 Auditorium on November 13 and the hands-on workshop (in building 5) on November 14. Registration starts at 8:00am, and the summit itself starts at 9:00am with a keynote by Intel's Yuliya Akulova titled Hybrid Laser Platform: The Power of Optics with the Scalability of Silicon.

There follow presentations by:

• Paul Ballentine of Mosaic Microsystems on Glass Substrates for RF and Photonics Applications
• Jose Capmany of iPronics on RF/nm and Programmable Photonics
• David Harame of AIM Photonics on What a Foundry Can Do to Make Better RF Photonics Devices
• Michael Hochberg of Elenion Technologies, topic to be announced
• Andrew McKee of Compound Semiconductor Technologies on Global, High-Performance InP Laser Technology Supporting RF Silicon Photonics Integration
• Thien Nguyen of GenXComm on RF Photonics Filtering

At the end of the day, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm, there will be a reception in the Building 10 lobby. I'm sure there will be prizes raffled, too, so stay until the end of the day with many engineers in the photonics community.

Workshop

The second day, November 14, is the workshop. Bring your laptop ready to design your own 5G photonics fronthaul circuits using Cadence's VIrtuoso and CurvyCore non-Manhattan geometry layout tool (see image above). Under the hood of the Cadence photonic design environment is the Lumerical's INTERCONNECT photonic layout simulation. The environment allows combined electrical and photonic simulation.

Registration

More details of the Cadence photonics solution are on the Photonics Product Page.

There is more information about the Photonics Summit and Workshop on the event page. You can register directly. I will see you there.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.