IOWN Global Forum Welcomes 23 New Companies at Member Meeting

The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN Global Forum) hosted its third Quarterly Member Meeting, Oct. 6-8, welcoming 23 new members to the growing list of participating companies committed to creating a smarter, sustainable, more connected world. The virtual gathering reported on progress that IOWN Global Forum has achieved since its founding in 2020 as an industry body committed to developing an all-photonics network and data-centric infrastructure that can resolve the power, bandwidth and latency issues associated with today's communication and computing infrastructure.

IOWN Global Forum President and Chairperson, Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe, gave opening remarks, with Dr. Hiroshi Shiragami, Executive Officer and Senior Vice President of Ajinomoto Corp., delivering the opening keynote address. He was followed by updates from Dr. Katsutoshi Itoh, Chair of the Use Case Working Group and head of Connectivity Technologies at Sony Group Corp., and Dr. Masahisa Kawashima, Chair of the Technology Working Group and head of IOWN Development Office of NTT Corp.

The meeting included a research workshop titled "Photonics-Electronics Convergence Technology for Low-Power, Data-Driven Information Processing Networks," as well as member presentations on topics such as "Virtual Worlds to Demonstrate the Future ? an Approach to Digital Twin Computing," and "Next-Generation Multi-Service Deterministic Networking."

Shingo Mizuno, Director of the IOWN Global Forum and Vice Head of the System Platform Business at Fujitsu Ltd., delivered closing remarks.

"We were delighted to greet members old and new and share how far IOWN Global Forum has come in such a short time," said Dr. Kawazoe, President and Chairperson of the forum. "The robust turnout reaffirmed our commitment to define an all-photonics network and a next-generation distributed computing architecture by 2030."

IOWN Global Forum Membership Continues to Expand
New IOWN members include:

Sponsor Members: KIOXIA Corp., PwC Japan and Samsung Electronics

General Members: Advantest Corp., AIOCORE, DIC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Honda Tsushin Kogyo Co., Ltd., IBIDEN Co., Ltd., I-PEX Inc., MIRISE Technologies Corp., OKI Electric Industry, Peers Co., Ltd., Sumitomo Corp. Kyushu Co., Ltd., Toyo Ink SC Holdings Co., Ltd. and UNIADEX Ltd.

Academic/Research Members: The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, the Photonics Electronics Technology Research Association, the Photonics Industry & Technology Development Association and Tohoku University

IOWN Global Forum membership continues to expand and now includes over 70 companies, academic and research institutes from Asia, North America and Europe that are committed to developing an all-optical approach to data sensing, collection, storage, processing and distribution that is unencumbered by the physical constraints of traditional electronics systems.

Details on IOWN Global Forum and membership information can be found at: https://www.iowngf.org.

About IOWN Global Forum
IOWN Global Forum's objective is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, and use cases and best practices.

Technology, telecommunications, and other industry organizations are invited to join the forum here. To learn more about IOWN Global Forum, download the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum Vision 2030 and Technical Directions White Paper here, or watch the "Looking Toward the Future ? IOWN Global Forum's Vision" webinar here.