11am thought: I suspect urinal / bathroom stall usage is distributed like a wave function with a de Broglie wavelength Next time you go to the bathroom: are you a a wave or are you a particle? I like to make the gut instinct choice first and then deliberately go for the one that seems most unnatural just to stick it to “the man”

So update from $LITE + Win Semi ( $SIVE ) foundry: Lumentum in a meeting with Stifel at ECOC 2026 stated: - $NVDA Spectrum-6 CPO UHP demands increased materially. - NPO as larger than CPO, with multi-wavelength external lasers lifting ASPs (Sivers offers multi wave length DFB arrays, read through on higher valued products) - Demand for UHP lasers continues to exceed supply Just a status update in terms of how the optical bottleneck is going (laser prices going up, demand exceeds supply). Digitimes also reported today Win Semi ( $SIVE foundry ) was expanding capacity for CW lasers. - "CW products... are expected to gradually emerge in the second half of 2026", with meaningful revenue contribution likely coming in 2027 and 2028. - Win has strengthened inventory management for InP substrates while moving toward 6-in InP wafers for ongoing process testing. Currently relies on Tier-1 International suppliers. - Many of this was spent on DUV tools from $ASML but (Win Semi's orders spanned machinery, equipment, and fab engineering work) So that answers a lot of questions about Sivers' partner "how is this company securing InP substrates", "4in vs 6in", "production timing" TLDR: - NPO > CPO (per Lite), multi-wavelength lasers going brrr for prices - demand > supply (continuation) - Not sure why people have been bear posting Win Semi when turns out they have everything needed to mass produce CW lasers.

- Lightmatter officially introduced Passage L20 CPX on September 17 and joined the Open CPX MSA, describing the product as the first bidirectional Open CPX optical engine for AI infrastructure. - Passage L20 CPX uses 1311 nm and 1331 nm wavelengths to carry transmit and receive traffic over the same single-mode fiber, cutting fiber and connector requirements by roughly 50% versus conventional UniDi architectures. - The module is designed for 6.4 Tbps Tx plus 6.4 Tbps Rx, or 12.8 Tbps aggregate bandwidth, using 32 optical lanes per direction at a 212.5 Gbps PAM4 line rate with more than 500 meters of SMF reach. - In Lightmatter's 512-GPU scale-up pod model, the architecture reduces fiber count from roughly 131,072 to 65,536 while eliminating approximately 16,000 connectors and more than 200 miles of fiber. - Lightmatter estimates that BiDi could reduce total scale-up interconnect network spending by roughly 15%, although this figure comes from internal modeling and will vary by topology and deployment configuration. - Importantly, this is not yet a volume-production product. Passage L20 CPX evaluation kits are expected to ship to customers in Q1 2027, and the disclosed specifications remain preliminary. - The announcement follows Lightmatter's June entry into NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion ecosystem and its August launch of an OCP CPO architecture effort targeting AI systems scaling from 72 to more than 1,024 nodes.

A-meow-zing 😻 @NASAWebb and @ChandraXray joined forces to deliver this view of the Cat's Paw Nebula. Different wavelengths combine to reveal young stars at the center of these dusty clouds.

TSMC could create a new “Moore’s Law for CPO,” doubling bandwidth every two years as it accelerates the rollout of co-packaged optics (CPO) to meet the soaring bandwidth requirements of AI data centers, according to a media report. TSMC will focus on three areas to scale CPO: • Per-lane speed: Increase single-channel speeds from 200G today to 400G and beyond • Optical channel density: Expand channel counts from 16 today to 32, then 64 and beyond • WDM (wavelength-division multiplexing): Enable each optical fiber to carry more wavelengths simultaneously The report forecasts that doubling bandwidth every two years could take CPO bandwidth from a 3.2T baseline today to around 410T by 2040 – 128x higher. $TSM

Terafab is not merely a larger fab. It is a thermodynamic rewrite of chipmaking. By replacing point-of-use laser-produced plasma with utility-scale ERL-FEL infrastructure, the consortium turns lithographic light into a shared utility generated centrally and distributed across the fab. That breaks dependence on the physical limits of tin-plasma sources and creates a tunable path toward 6.7 nm Beyond EUV: adjust the accelerator’s electron energy, shift the photon wavelength, and drive the next generation of patterning. The old model installs a light source inside every machine. The Terafab model builds a photon power plant. This is not just semiconductor scaling. It is the industrialization of light.

"Wonder is an essential survival skill." We walk past nature without giving it a second thought. Robert Macfarlane reminds us of the wonder behind a rainbow: "When you see a rainbow, you still stop. That's wonder. Rainbows are the charismatic megafauna of wonder. They do it often and well." "The other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke. It was no one else's rainbow, because it's a prismatic function: the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths. If you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. That's wondrous." "And science finesses the real into wonder. Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world, just understand a little bit better how it works." "I don't see science and wonder as opposed."