Optics & Networking

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

GPU Networking, Part 4: Year End Wrap

NVIDIA, Broadcom, Marvell, AMD, Arista Networks, Cisco, Astera Labs, Credo. NVLink v UALink v ESUN. AEC competition. Optical v Electrical. And More!

Dec 20, 2025 • Austin Lyons

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