TeamNP walked away a winner on so many levels last week in Frankfurt as we converged with more than 1600 industry colleagues from thirty countries to celebrate 50 years of ECOC. This year’s ECOC exhibition experience included our expanded sales and marketing team along with a brighter spotlight on the achievements of our leadership team in optical connectivity innovation. We were all smiles from start to finish after three busy and exciting days.
With the increasingly critical nature of sustainability gaining ground on data center evolution, the heightened industry attention on power reduction and energy efficiency right alongside the focus on 1.6Tbps AI infrastructure set a tone of enthusiasm for the all-optics conversations we are driving. Low power demands are rising to the level of capacity and speed from hyper scalers and data centers driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The exponential growth of AI clusters drove every conversation each day on the combination of latency, power, and cost efficiency performance and for scale AI workloads.
And starting on day one the most amplified buzz in our pluggables and transceiver segment highlighted the race to deliver next generation solutions catering to 800Gbps and more importantly 1.6Tbsp data transmission.
There was plenty of excitement from customers, industry partners and the media for our own 1.6Tbps product updates in our innovative PIC solutions for transceivers. Before the show even started, we introduced a new addition to the NPG102 family, and on Tuesday we jointly announced a major strategic collaboration announcement with SoftBank. But our biggest news of the week celebrated our NPG102 Transmitter on Chip for LPO-based modules that put us into a new category: award-winning innovation.
And the Most Innovative Photonic Component award goes to …
It was a giant honor to make the shortlist of nominees in the Most Innovative category at ECOC. In our first submission year as the recognized up-and-comer we were proud to stand alongside major industry players like Huawei and Coherent representing innovation in photonic components.
So, when they announced us as the winner of the Most Innovative Photonic Component for our transceiver module product with its novel integrated optical equalizer, well, the shock and excitement can’t be under stated.
Standing among this group of industry innovators and accepting this honor marked a deserved milestone for both NewPhotonics founders Yaniv Ben Haim and Yosef Ben Ezra as they represented our highly expert and enthusiastic engineering team achieving critical milestones on our journey delivering on the all-optics promise for the AI-era data center.
Showcase a Winning PIC Product for LPO
We kicked off day one of ECOC in the popular Market Focus theater with a presentation on our ‘built-for-interop’ led transmitter on chip design for LPO. Contributing to the many thought-provoking presentations among the most forward-thinking companies working in optics today, our CTO Yosef Ben Ezra addressed an engage crowd that continues to support the future of LPO deployment.
Yosef’s talk shared technical insights into the value of our integrated optical equalizer and the progression of latency and power enhancements that make up the all-optics advantage in the transceiver module.
While this presentation came before ECOC declared NPG102 TOC for LPO-based modules a most innovative product, it set the right tone for distinguishing our chip as a leader validating the LPO movement in photonic integrated circuit design.
Our on-going conversations on LPO with industry leaders including Arista Networks founder Andy Bechtolsheim play a critical role as well in the future of next generation signal processing driven entirely by optical connectivity solutions.
Entering the CPO Sphere in Strategic Collaboration with Softbank
In yet another important strategic motion for LPO, on Tuesday at ECOC we made global industry news announcing our collaboration agreement with SoftBank Corporation. Our joint effort will advance photonics for LPO, CPO and all-optics switch fabric for AI-RAN in the data center.
As a growth silicon photonics company developing innovative all-optics connectivity solutions, our strategic partnership with the global technology provider continues our journey to provide a new generation of energy efficient and high-performance data transmission chips. We’ll target improved GPU/CPU/switch fabric performance with PIC and low latency optical connectivity as well as address power consumption and capacity bottlenecks in AI cluster workloads.
With coherent optics and the increasing focus on data center interconnect challenges, this joint effort with SoftBank marks an important strategic application of our technology expertise.
Optical Advantage for Today’s Transceiver: NPG102 PIC chip for DSP-based Modules
Ahead of the trade show we introduced a new addition to our NPG product family led by the NPG102 TOC for LPO-based modules introduced in March. The formal launch of our NPG102 PIC TOC for DSP-based transceiver modules expands on our optical-head chips for both LPO-based and DSP-based transceivers.
The spotlight on sustainability is driving advances in DSP with integrated electrical and optical components delivering high speed optical transceivers for data centers and hyperscalers. Our optical head low power, low latency NPG102 PIC transmitter on chip (TOC) for DSP-based transceivers meets the urgent need for transition to low latency and energy efficient 1.6Tbps optical signal processing.
And it brings good news for OEM production and transceiver integrators as well. Our TOC with integrated lasers improves system integration with wafer-level laser alignment and integrated direct modulation resulting in accelerated yield maturity and time to market for module manufacturers.
In-person is the best optics
Industry partnerships play a key role in the success of this silicon photonics, optics, and connectivity ecosystem to drive forward the next generation of data performance demanded by AI. We enjoyed a packed schedule of in-person meetings with customers, partners, collaborators, and industry influencers – a sometimes double or triple booked day of informative and insightful exchanges critical to our momentum forward. Highlights of this year’s networking included:
Attending and proudly sponsoring the EPIC VIP Networking Reception where Yaniv joined honored guest presenter Andy Bechtolsheim at the private gathering.
Attending and proudly sponsoring the Optica Executive Reception where Yosef and Doron Tal interacted with CTO Jose Pozo and industry leaders.
Celebrating the 10th year in business with our partner Luceda Photonics. And our collaboration marks another milestone as we jointly host our first webinar with Luceda later this month on delivering the LPO advantage through the SiP chip value chain. Be sure to register!
Preparing for NPG102 chips in 2025
We’re looking ahead to the next industry gathering with major milestones on that horizon. We are committed to advancing the transition to LPO/LRO with low latency/low power optical signal processing innovation. Rest assured we are back to work this week as TeamNP maintains our laser focus delivering on the promise of LPO and the optical connectivity advantage in 2025.
