Optics & Networking

🎙️ PicoJool’s Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects

GaAs VCSELs at 200G/lane, unconstrained supply vs. indium phosphide, the 8×200 / 16×100 / 32×50 flavors, WIN Semiconductors, the roadmap to 12.8T, and…

Jul 16 • Austin Lyons

Inside the 800G → 1.6T → 3.2T Race

Timing is everything. What the industry said about 800G, 1.6T, 3.2T in recent earnings calls

May 19 • Austin Lyons

VCSELs + 200G Wall In AI Datacenters?

Decades of short-reach dominance, the supply chain holding it up today, and the problems at the 200G transition

May 6 • Austin Lyons

Coherent's Vertical Integration Strategy

Coherent makes more of the optical stack in-house than any competitor. We walk through the business, the growth vectors, and whether breadth beats…

Apr 1 • Austin Lyons

GTC 2026 Keynote Debrief

Scale up, CPUs, Groq, tiered inference economics, SaaS is not dead

Mar 17 • Austin Lyons

Optics Primer, Part 3: Co-Packaged Optics (CPO)

From EML lasers and DSPs to silicon photonics and external CW lasers. How CPO works and the impact on the optical supply chain.

Mar 9 • Austin Lyons

Broadcom Makes Lasers?

Broadcom's InP fab, EMLs at 1.6T, full-stack CPO play, and comparing against Lumentum and Coherent

Mar 3 • Austin Lyons

Lumentum and the Laser Bottleneck

Lumentum is winning and still can't keep up. Coherent is closing in. Earnings, sell-side sentiment, and the tensions to track.

Mar 2 • Austin Lyons

Arista's Ethernet Bet

Q4 FY2025 earnings scored against the bull and bear cases

Feb 23 • Austin Lyons

Optics Primer, Part 2: LRO & LPO

LRO and LPO move signal processing out of the transceiver and into the switch, saving power at the cost of tighter system coupling. An incremental step…

Jan 26 • Austin Lyons

Credo’s Reliability Thesis

Can Credo Reach Beyond AECs?

Jan 15 • Austin Lyons

Optics Primer, Part 1: Traditional Pluggable Optics

Optical interconnects, pluggable transceivers, optical and electrical engines, DSP overhead, power and latency trade-offs

Dec 23, 2025 • Austin Lyons

#nojs-banner { position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0; padding: 16px 16px 16px 32px; width: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; background: red; color: white; font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; } #nojs-banner a { color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; } This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts