For a decade, photonics packaging was the last mile of assembly that nobody talked about. AI has pushed it center stage, with the market set to grow from $4.5B to $14.4B in six years — driven not by transceivers but by three new tracks opening at once: CPO, AR microLED and FMCW LiDAR. Part 1 of the series lays out the big picture.

At OFC 2026, NVIDIA unpacked the design core of single-lane 200Gb/s silicon photonics microring modulators. We break down 3D IC integration, inductive peaking and PN junction trade-offs - the key technology path for CPO interconnects in AI factories.

This week: Lumentum's revenue nearly doubles as 1.6T ramps, NVIDIA invests $2B in Coherent's InP capacity, China's NDRC blocks Meta's Manus deal, and TSMC's COUPE silicon photonics platform heads toward mass production.

Token demand wants 10x a year while supply delivers only 2x, and the compounding 5x gap can only be closed by architecture. Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade's key line at OCP APAC wasn't about CPO but this: the unit of adoption shrinks from a whole rack to a single chassis.

In one week, TSMC moved CPO from slideware onto a production schedule, and Lumentum seized pricing power at the light source. Two narrow gates, TSMC COUPE capacity and 200G EML supply, now decide who gets to play in the 2026 1.6T cycle.

CPO decks spend 90% of their time on chips, but data center operators ask one question: can you swap the fiber? The fiber array unit (FAU) is now a battleground of four coupling physics, with fifteen companies staking out positions.

Generative AI is driving explosive compute demand, and silicon photonics is the key to breaking transmission limits. This recap breaks down TSMC's COUPE, Elaser's ELSFP packaging, multicore fiber and automated testing to map the optical supply chain's path to volume production.

Once CPO is in volume, the next question is who stacks the PIC and EIC. TSMC, ASE and Intel come in from different positions with three routes — hybrid bonding, fan-out and chiplet. The race isn't about who has the best technology but who locks in the standard first.

CPO took five years of hype to finally take off. It won't kill pluggables, which still grow to $7.8B; CPO is an additional $5.1B market for 51.2T+ switches and GPU scale-up fabrics. Part 2 breaks down the three-stage evolution and the NVIDIA vs. Broadcom route split.

Taken apart, FOCI's six core CPO/FAU patents cover six different things; together they tell one story: engineering the fiber-to-chip connection for silicon photonics. Five shared design principles and patent-by-patent status show how this FAU leader is positioned in the COUPE supply chain.

Mapped along the "life of light", TSMC's 52 silicon photonics patents fall into six layers that stack up into COUPE. Our take: TSMC isn't selling patents, it's selling a manufacturable optical path, and that will redraw the division of labor across the CPO supply chain.