ECOC Takeaways: Mixed Bag of Technologies as Customer Roadmaps Diverge

We spent our time walking the booths and meeting with companies at ECOC. Volume CPO timing is aligning more with the turn of the decade (if not later) and NPO solutions are starting to fill in the gap; 2028 will be the real transition year. NPO seems real as an intermediate step to CPO, with deployment types using either an ELS on the faceplate or an ILS (integrated laser within the optical engine), and each NPO solution needs multi-channel TIAs and drivers worth hundreds of dollars per server. COHR sized a CPO/NPO SAM of $30B by 2030, up from its prior $15B, with PhotonLink content opportunity up to $15k per 100T chip. The market remains tight in lasers and perhaps DSPs, with choke points in InP supply and DSP capacity due to shortages of leading-edge wafers at TSMC;