Towards 2020 – Photonics driving economic growth in Europe

2. Photonics Research and Innovation Challenges
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We will soon live in a world in which everything
that could be connected will be connected. As well
as connecting homes, broadband technologies will
also connect businesses, equipments and infrastructures
for research and production, opening
up new commercial opportunities and enabling
different ways of living. All these solutions will
need photonic systems and technologies, because
they are the only possible way to sufficiently reduce
energy consumption, whilst still providing the
high levels of performance demanded. Photonics
is the enabling technology for all wireless and wired
broadband technologies.
Demands for connectivity and data are growing
exponentially. Moreover, information storage,
manage ment and security will require new, dedicated
solutions to match these demands. All such challenges
will need broadband access to network resources,
a high capacity flexible network, and a large
number of network environments, such as datacentres,
power grids and research infrastructures.
In addition to these challenges, increasing global
competition from APAC (China, India) and the US
requires greater innovation and more entrepreneurship
in Europe to reinforce and grow its leading
role. The ability of European industry to customise
and provide successful end-to-end solutions, particularly
photonic solutions, will be the key to securing
future employment for Europe.
Major photonics needs
Photonic systems and networks, architecture
and functionalities must undergo significant
changes to cope with new applications. With the
growing concern about energy efficiency and carbon
emissions, significant changes are necessary
in all network layers and segments (core/metro/
access/datacentre). Moreover, major needs exist
to make the networks faster, more secure, more
flexible, more transparent, easier to use, and to
bring them closer to the customer. Functionalities
for which photonics can bring unique advantages,
have to be addressed. These will primarily be highcapacity,
high-speed and low latency transmission
of data between arbitrary end-points, and could
also extend into areas such as encryption, switching,
quantum communication and computing.
Novel and disruptive techniques are required to
cope with the ever-increasing demands for capacity,
especially in the backbone networks, for which
a transmission capacity of several times 100 Tbps
per fibre is predicted by the year 2020. Today the
growth in datacentre traffic is demanding more energy
efficient ways of computing and moving data
across the network. Photonics opens up exciting
Photonics is the enabling
technology for all wireless
and wired broadband
technologies.
The speed of the internet is
critical for the future knowledge
society. © Fotolia