 50 million pieces (a volume that do not exist all over the market) and is around 20% of the preproduction costs. At the volume of 100,000 pieces, that is reasonable as an order of magnitude for the DWDM PIC application, the cost is a bit lower, 40% of the preproduction cost, while the high-performance FPGA at the same volume has a cost as low as 1% of the preproduction cost. This clear difference is due to the combined effect of several factors: Work cost importance in the case of PICs Importance of the BOM in the case of PICs Single application (telecommunication dedicated) versus the flexibility of FPGA that allows much higher volumes Lack of global roadmap and standardization The first two elements have been already commented on. As far as the last two are con- sidered, they push the BOM of the FPGA to decrease more rapidly with volume, since the circuit producer can leverage on the standardization to share similar BOM elements among different products SO increasing the effective volume offered to the supplier and further lowering the price. 10.2.2 Optical Digital Network Architecture and Design In this section, we will briefly summarize the architecture of both the data plane and the control and management planes of the ODN. In this analysis, we will assume that the technology evolution will completely solve the issues considered in the previous section SO to allow a wide ODN deployment. 10.2.2.1 ODN Control and Management Plane As far as the management and control planes are concerned, the ODN, if widely deployed, will be based on a GMPLS protocol suite. The processing ability of each ODN network element will easily allow the elaboration of distributed protocols and a reporting to the management. However, the use of PICs in the network elements is not irrelevant for the control plane protocol suite. Naturally, the specific protocol elements that have to be adapted at the new hardware depend on the way in which the PIC is used. To better understand the implications of this situation, we will focus our attent