OPTICAL TRANSCEIVER PCBs: MS highlighting ZDT $4958 TT as beneficiary of team's recent upward revision of optical transceiver TAM. Will gain share due to technical ability & capacity to make the denser, more complex mSAP PCBs needed for 800G/1.6T transceivers, which command 2-4x the ASP of 400G. Worried about CPO pushout? Pluggable demand will remain strong.

OPTICAL / CPO Negativity: Optical names didn't get much boost from Computex and are underperforming during the correction. Some negativity on CPO rollout related to manufacturing yields noted by MS today. Not what the names needed (admittedly, CPO not directly relevant for all). FOCI $3363; LANDMARK $3081; SANTEC $6777; FURUKAWA $5801; SEI $5802; YOFC $6869

Rosenblatt on recent optical sector weakness from $AAOI to $LITE: "Stocks in the Optical sector have traded poorly for the last 1-2 months" due to CPO delay reports and China capacity scares. "We think short sellers... do not actually strongly believe in the thesis." Multiple short sellers told them they will likely close their positions... late July and early August. Further, they say they plan to buy Optical stocks in 2027 for the scale up CPO opportunity. Hilarious report on laser weakness, read is very positive for $SIVEF, $COHR, and others moving forward. I've been long on CPO sector, but seems like institutions want entry points, just a bit later on.

Breaking the "Memory Wall": Optical Interconnects Emerge in GPU–HBM Packaging As a solution to the "memory wall," one of the chronic challenges in AI semiconductors, the memory and packaging industries at home and abroad are weighing an approach that decouples the GPU and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and packages them separately. The core idea is to move the HBM—until now mounted right next to the GPU—a certain distance away, and bridge the gap with light (optics), allowing several times more HBM to be installed than is possible today. On the 22nd, a researcher at a major domestic memory maker said, "We're currently struggling to expand HBM bandwidth and capacity, so we're discussing with customers a plan to overcome the GPU's shoreline limit through optical interconnects and mount more HBM." Shoreline refers to the length of the chip's perimeter. In today's AI computing environment, the key factor dragging down compute efficiency is the data transfer speed of memory chips. While GPU performance has grown by leaps and bounds with each generation, the speed at which memory stores and supplies data has failed to keep pace—creating a structural performance barrier, the memory wall. The arrival of HBM, with its wide data pathways, put out the immediate fire, but critics continue to point out that bandwidth and transfer speeds still fall short of handling the explosive growth in AI compute. Until now, the industry has focused on stacking HBM ever higher to increase memory capacity and bandwidth within a confined footprint. But as stack counts climbed past 12 and 16 layers toward 20 and beyond, process difficulty rose exponentially. The technology hit physical limits, including the growing difficulty of meeting fixed height specifications. Vertical stacking has reached an inflection point—so much so that the JEDEC standards body has relaxed its HBM height specifications. The bigger problem is that if stack counts can't be raised, the alternative is to add more HBM horizontally around the GPU—but that, too, is impossible. In the current 2.5D packaging structure, the GPU and HBM are mounted tightly together on a single substrate. Within this structure, the number of HBM units that can be placed is strictly limited by the finite length of the GPU chip's perimeter—its shoreline. Even when more HBM is desired, there is physically no room to place it, leaving the industry in a structural deadlock. The alternative now emerging across the semiconductor industry is to separate the GPU and HBM and package them independently. It overturns the conventional chip-design principle that components must sit close together to minimize data transfer time. Instead of keeping the two chips adjacent, the approach spaces them apart and links them with overwhelmingly fast optical signals to overcome the added physical distance. Placing the HBM slightly away from the GPU within the board frees the design from the GPU's shoreline constraint. With the spatial limitation gone, far more HBM can be spread out laterally and packed into the board—several times more than today—without having to push stack heights to extremes. This means the total memory capacity and data bandwidth of the AI accelerator system would expand dramatically, on a scale incomparable to current systems. "Discussing Placing HBM Beneath the GPU"… Form Factor Could Change The industry is now producing a range of architectural design proposals over where exactly to place the HBM within the GPU board. The same memory researcher said, "Options under discussion range from broadly utilizing the space immediately around the GPU to isolating the HBM beneath the GPU board." He added, "In the latter case—isolating it beneath the GPU board—the motherboard would have to be extended lengthwise, so we're discussing even an overall form-factor change with the GPU maker." Specifically, the HBM might surround the GPU from several centimeters away, or a separate HBM zone might be created in the center of the board. "We're keeping every possibility open as we discuss the optimal layout," he said. "Nothing has been confirmed as an official roadmap yet, but as part of preliminary research toward next-generation AI accelerators, we're in talks with our partners." The outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) industry is also watching this trend closely. An executive at a global OSAT firm said, "Optical interconnects are a clear trajectory. The only question is timing," predicting that "rack-to-rack and server-to-server links will go optical first, and then chip-to-chip connections within the board will follow." He added, "The larger units will be connected by light first, but optical research is moving so fast that it may not be that far off." Technically, the optical-interconnect technology linking GPU and HBM shares the same underlying principle as the technology connecting server to server inside a data center. The difference is the high technical barrier of shrinking optical-conversion technology—once used for communication between large pieces of equipment—down to the microscopic scale of a single board and chipset. An executive at a domestic developer of co-packaged optics (CPO) components explained, "As HBM stack heights approach their limit, the industry is discussing spreading the memory out laterally to maximize how much can physically be mounted." He added, "The principle is the same as conventional data-center optical interconnects, but HBM optical links that have to operate within a confined board space require optical components to be miniaturized to far smaller sizes and far higher integration density—so the technical difficulty is greater."

Market rumors: Finisar optical modules price increase by 15-20%, mirroring the recent surge in memory prices. This once again confirms the logic of this chart. 🚀 ‘’Finisar’’ is a subsidiary of $COHR (Coherent Corp.). The recent price increase in optical modules signals tight supply in the market, which has significantly enhanced the bargaining power of optical module suppliers

Be Barrons: - Wants to write about optical supply supply chains like $AAOI - Hiring DPT: who needs engineers to write about this something this simple? Let’s find underpaid political philosophy backgrounds. - proceeds to find a new hire from nonprofit communication consulting - first day on job: gets paid to model revenue ramp/margins projections, CW laser bottlenecks, internal capacity - New hire: “I don’t understand this sht”, “looks like a memestock” Barrons: “Memestock? looks like our next article, I don’t understand either”.

Earlier today, optical interconnect company Lumilens "emerges from stealth" at a $5.5B valuation, after raising $700m. Just as a recap from $POET / $SIVE Linkedin OSINT mapping I shared earlier, Lumilens was supplying a top 3 hyperscaler customer. So we got confirmation of that a month later, along with the material figure that Lumilens has a "multi-billion-dollar customer agreement". And just for reference, $POET has existing contracts with Lumilens ($50m purchase order, up to $500m) + contracts with $SIVE (depending on product lines). I actually took tiny positions in POET again after reading this news, since it finally gives them visibility into extremely well funded hyperscaler suppliers (on top of Poet's really large balance sheet). But TLDR: > Lumilens around similar (or even higher) valuations as Lightmatter/Ayar, bigger than markets thought with hyperscaler customers. > nice read through upstream on $POET (derisking) / $SIVE. > Great for optical valuations in general, seeing a company go to $5.5B in 2 years.