Research activities in photonic devices for BBA systems

The number of Internet users is increasing very rapidly, and data traffic is growing dramatically. A large and dramatic transition has occurred in relation to the information network. In Japan, a 100 Mbit/s class broadband service is now available through fiber to the home (FTTH) at the lowest price in the world and the number of FTTH users exceeded 12.1 million in March, 2008. Broadband traffic roughly doubles each year. This makes it necessary to reconstruct the NW to meet the requirement for a huge transmission capacity. We are changing the network from a legacy telephony network to a new network, which is a broadband network based on Internet Protocol (IP). The photonic technology is the key to create the broadband network system. This talk will describe the innovation of photonic device technologies.