Silvano Donati, Tiziana Tambosso and Stefano Riva Sanseverino at the WFOPC’05 in Mondello –Palermo (Italy), with the Cape Gallo in the background

WFOPC’05 - the International Workshop on Fibers and Optical Passive Components has been held in Palermo-Mondello (Italy) from 22 to 24 June 2005. It was the fourth edition after the first two held in Pavia (1998 and 2000) and the third held in Glasgow (2002).
When planning this edition, we were very concerned about the post-bubble attendance of this small but once very active scientific community. Following the 33% drop in attendance of the 2002 respect to the 2000, we decided to wait one more year before re-editing the workshop, hoping the migrant birds will be back. Luckily, our intuition has been rewarded, because attendance climbed up to 107 (+48% compared to 2002), churning out a 410-page Proceedings from the over 98 contributed papers that have been submitted (of which 20% rejected).
Chairman of the workshop has been Prof. Stefano Riva Sanseverino, Director of the CRES (Centro Ricerca Elettronica in Sicilia) and Full Professor of Optoelectronics at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Palermo. The Technical Committee was chaired by Massimo Artiglia, formerly with CSELT (Turin) and now with CoreCom, a spinoff of the Polytechnic of Milano. And, behind them, Silvano Donati and Tiziana Tambosso couldn’t be missing to help gathering the threads, after the experience they gained with the first two WFOPCs.
The program arranged for the two and a half days of the workshop was on a par attractive as the beautiful landscape offered to participants during the coffee breaks and the lunches at the Albergo La Torre hosting the meeting.
There were very high quality invited papers on: CMOS Photonic Technology (C.Gunn, Luxtera), Microstructured Fibers (D.Richardson, University of Southampton), AWGs (M.Smit, University of Eindhoven), Microring Resonators (S.Mookererjea, University of San Diego), MEM/MOEMS Reliability (P.Weiss, Colibrys, Switzerland), SoI Platforms (D.Taillert, University of Ghent), Planar Waveguide Optical Filters (Christi Madsen, University ofTexas A&M), Poled Optical Fibers (V.Pruneri, Avanex, Milan) Reliability of Passive Optical Components (H.Limberger, EFPL, Lausanne), and Waveguide Index Contrast for Passive Components (A.Melloni, Polytechnic of Milan).
Contributed papers and posters were attracting much interest as well, in the spirit of a workshop that, since the first edition, has been proactive of discussions and cross-fertilization of ideas, a circumstance particularly appreciated by youngster and post-Docs attending for the first time.
The program featured eleven Sessions, and along with the favourite headlines, two of them were devoted to Photonic Crystals, one to WDM and filters, one to Ring Resonators and one to Modulator and Switches.
In addition, a novelty has been the “showcase session” at the end the afternoon contributed session, in which exhibitors were given 15 minutes to present their products to the audience.
Attendance has been representative of a truly international blend, featuring a 25% from Italy, 35% from Europe, 25% from United States and 15% from Japan. The social dinner has been held at the Palazzo Raffadali, a historical building dating back to the 14th century and still lived in by the descendants of the homonym Princes.
The papers presented at the Workshop are collected in a relatively thick, 410-page volume of the Proceeding. As WFOPC has become since 2002 an official LEOS Workshop, its papers belong to the ieeexplore circuit and will be available on the web in a short time.
Needless to say, the reception of the local organizing commettee, headed by Salvatore Ferruggia Bonura, has been exceptionally warm and hospitable, so that all attendees had a real pleasant stay and a profitable networking.
Next WFOPC will be in 2007, and candidates are being reviewed for the assignment. Stay tuned with the Italian web to watch next venue, at http://www.unipv.it/leos.
Picture of the attendees are on display for some while on the workshop web, se them at http://leos.cres.it/wfopc