Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending OFC 2026 in Los Angeles. In Part 2, LightCounting’s Vladimir Kozlov, Chris Cole, and Aloe Semiconductor’s Chris Doerr share their thoughts.
Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting
The resurgence of interest in near-packaged optics (NPO) surprised me the most at OFC. Meta and Oracle hinted that they will deploy near-packaged optics first, but co-packaged optics (CPO) will be the ultimate solution.
There are rumours that suppliers are placing large-volume orders for near-packaged optics. The Consortium of On-Board Optics (COBO) was ahead of its time, but only by a few years. Will Microsoft deploy near-packaged optics this time? And why did they give up on COBO? We could have been on the 3rd or 4th generation of COBO modules by now, and this is what it takes to get the technology right.
New technology continues to surprise as well. Polarisation management in silicon photonic chips, shown by Silith, and the low-voltage method for tuning micro-rings, shown by NewPhotonics, are good examples here.
With all the attention on co-packaged and near-packaged optics, the pluggable community, led by Arista’s Andy Bechtolsheim, is struggling to impress.
Deployment of linear pluggable optics (LPO) remains limited. The 1.6-terabit Linear Retimed Optics (LRO) may see more deployments this year, but who knows?
Andy Bechtolsheim rushed in to introduce the XPO form factor, focusing intensely on marketing it and promoting its success.
But XPO only supports 200 gigabit-per-lane electrical signalling. I was hoping to see a 400 gigabit-per-lane solution as well. This is how the OSFP form factor gained market acceptance: it started as a 50 gigabit-per-lane alternative to QSFP-DD and became the dominant solution for 100 gigabit-per-lane modules.
Can XPO follow this strategy by starting with 200 gigabit-per-lane and blossoming to 400 gigabit-per-lane?
Lastly, several suppliers commented that they reached a point at which they could no longer accelerate.
We have been accelerating for three years now, and it shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, there is pressure to move even faster. Are we reaching a breaking point when customers are going nuts and suppliers turn into zombies?
Are we starting to make irrational decisions? I hope not, but it is never too early to raise this question. Can we stop, take a deep breath, and take a sober look at the situation? Let us not get carried away with the excitement.
I feel that LightCounting is the designated driver at this party.
Chris Cole, Optical Communications Advisor
My favourite OFC quote was during Sunday’s AI interconnect Session from Anthony Torza of Cisco who commented that co-packaged optics integration is inevitable but not imminent.
My favourite insight was from Rebecca Schaevitz of MixxTech, which she first shared at DesignCon, that co-packaged optics will become mainstream like ASICs when optics packaging meets JEDEC standards, most importantly by eliminating epoxy.
Volume optics deployment became clear during OFC. Next is 200 gigabit-per-lane PAM4 full and half-retimed pluggable, with innovation in density and cooling coming from new form factors like XPO and OIF High Density.
Initial co-packaged optics deployment will be fully linear as part of complete box solutions, with the ramp in volumes likely to be modest. The next generation of pluggable and co-packaged optics will double the rate to 400 gigabit-per-lane PAM4 with half-retimed pluggable and linear co-packaged optics looking feasible.
It is not clear where the market is for the multitude of optics companies not in the few closed ecosystems like Broadcom’s and Nvidia’s.
Meta continued to set the bar for the minimum required to demonstrate that integrated optics are real. They published more comprehensive traffic and reliability statistics of Broadcom’s co-packaged optics integrated with a switch in boxes running in racks, adding to previous results presented at ECOC and OCP events.
The Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement (OCI MSA) represents a return to fundamentals for the optics industry by specifying non-return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation and dense WDM bandwidth scaling. Optical PAM4 was adopted despite Shannon’s capacity theorem telling us to do otherwise. However, given the enormous investment in ASIC SerDes, OCI is likely to remain niche until after the 400-gigabit PAM4 generation. Cisco’s Torza’s quote applies here; inevitable but not imminent.
The excess hype surrounding integrated optics confirmed that we are in an investment bubble. There are too many investment dollars chasing too few real optics technologies. Most investments have little chance of leading to useful products.
Transformational optics require new process development, which is frightfully expensive and takes a long time, a brutal reality that doesn’t make for an exciting pitch deck. Start-ups know this and spin fantasies for which they are richly rewarded, the less plausible the higher the investment dollars.
For investors, this is the correct strategy because a fantastic story is much more likely to get next-round investors excited. The trick is not to be the one left standing when the music stops. A perennial example continuing at OFC is optical computing, an illusion supported by bad mathematics and optical communication advantages irrelevant in computing..
Chris Doerr, CEO of Aloe Semiconductor
I had four take-aways from OFC, and they all start with the letter “c”: chemistry, coherent, co-packaged optics, and consortium.
Chemistry: materials with heavy elements are on allocation, such as the indium phosphide wafers used to make lasers and modulators. This is because of high demand for optical transceivers and broken supply chains due to trade wars. This world-wide shortage of heavy-element materials is driving strong interest in silicon photonics.
Silicon’s atomic number is only 14 and thus in very plentiful supply.
Coherent: in the constant battle between intensity-modulation direct-detection (IM-DD) and coherent, coherent is suddenly starting to win. This is driven by unexpected forces, such as optical circuit switches now used in data centres.
Interestingly, coherent is the antithesis of “slow and wide”, and coherent seems to be winning.
Co-packaged optics (CPO): CPO has become red hot. The CPO workshop on Sunday was in a huge room yet was so crowded that many people had to stand outside. However, CPO is more confusing than ever. It is not clear if it is for scale-up or scale-out or both architectures. Also, the introduction of giant, liquid-cooled pluggables, such as the XPO, make CPO less compelling.
Consortium: multiple new consortiums were introduced at OFC: the XPO, the Open CPX MSA, and the OCI MSA. This trend seems to show that needs are so urgent that traditional standards bodies have to be bypassed by self-aggregating groups of companies.
On other topics, a new phrase was breathed into life at this OFC: “scale-across”. It has become a triumvirate with “scale-up” and “scale-out”. Scale-across mainly addresses the disaggregation of computing centrrs due to power supply and/or cooling constraints.
Lastly, OFC 2026 showcased that 200-plus gigabaud optics is a reality, with multiple demonstrations in all platforms, including silicon photonics.