Photonics: The $91 Billion Question (Pt.1)
CPO's $91 Billion Assumption, NPO's Quiet Momentum, and the OCS Wildcard — Mapping the Bottlenecks That Will Separate Winners from Consensus Darlings
Broadcom
Notes: POET Technologies - The Optical Interposer Thesis
POET’s Optical Interposer replaces costly active alignment with wafer-level pick-and-place packaging, opening AI optical engines to high-volume CMOS-scale manufacturing.
Notes: The Bottleneck Heuristic — Blackwell's Gauntlet, the ASIC Breakout, and the Optical Chokepoint (Pt.2)
Blackwell’s packaging, cooling, NVL72, and on-chip SFU bottlenecks exposed NVDA’s gauntlet — while Google’s AVGO-designed TPUv7 shattered the ASIC skepticism and the optical chokepoint tightened into 2025’s defining constraint.
Notes: Light is the Future (Pt.2)
Summary
* The optical supply chain bottleneck into 2026 is EML capacity, with 200G EMLs (needed for 1.6T) far tighter than 100G and keeping pricing and allocations elevated.
* Silicon photonics is the short-term “release valve” for EML shortages by shifting more functionality onto PICs and using CW light sources,
Notes: Light is the Future (Pt.1)
Summary
* DeepSeek, Huawei, and then AVGO in 2025 pulled forward the timeline for optical adoption, flipping the “copper-first” consensus and reshaping cluster design priorities.
* DeepSeek’s P/D MoE inference shows scale-out fabrics can handle high-performance inference across hundreds of GPUs, reducing the marginal value of ever-
Themes - SysMoore & Hardware Renaissance In The Next Decade (Pt.1)
Reflections: Platform Vs. Point BoB In Enterprise Tech
Summary
* The debate between focused startups and compounded startups in the enterprise tech industry continues, with differing views among investors.
* Focused startups argue that specialization and excellence in one area is key to competitive edge and survival.
* Compounded startups believe that creating a platform of interdependent solutions can provide better