CONNECT WITH US
Aug 12, 15:35
OCP photonics panel warns CPO packaging is still unsettled as pluggables fade

Pluggable front-panel optics still own the market, but Arista co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim gave them a deadline at an OCP APAC panel here: the form factor reaches its physical limit at the 49.6T switch generation, roughly 18 months out.

Co-packaged optics has become the inflection point for AI infrastructure, but the industry has not yet built the shared testing standards and simulation groundwork the technology needs, ASE senior technical program manager Nicole Tien said at the OCP APAC summit.

Nvidia's Spectrum-6 co-packaged optics (CPO) switches are in production and shipping, Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of networking at Nvidia, stated at the OCP APAC Summit 2026 — and the manufacturing chain behind them runs heavily through Taiwan.

Nvidia is intensifying its open-source strategy through its upcoming trillion-parameter model in the Nemotron 4 family, which is meant to compete with the world's leading open-source models, according to The Information. While this may put it in the awkward position of vying against its customers, the chipmaker's advocacy for open-source AI could see the company benefit from more chip sales across the board.

China's leading DRAM maker CXMT has reportedly raised its DDR5 production yield above 90%, narrowing the gap with Samsung Electronics and strengthening its position in the global PC memory supply chain.

Touch controller and display driver IC maker FocalTech Systems said it saw revenue regain quarter-on-quarter momentum in the second quarter of 2026 as the 618 shopping festival, new device launches, and stronger notebook and tablet demand lifted sales. The company, which held an investor briefing, said persistent memory price pressure and weak peak-season demand for high-end Android phones still kept revenue below 2025 levels.

Speaking at the OCP APAC Summit in Taipei, Subi Kengeri, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Systems to Materials at Applied Materials, delivered a keynote warning that the artificial intelligence boom faces a critical bottleneck: energy efficiency.

SK Hynix is restarting a long-frozen expansion of its Dalian, China, NAND flash plant, adding capacity that will lift output at the site by roughly 50%. The move comes as the AI boom turns memory chips into one of the tightest-supplied components in the industry, according to the Seoul Economic Daily.

Intel appears to be restarting work on Fab 38, its long-idle facility in Kiryat Gat, Israel, though how far the project will go — and whether it will ultimately run the company's bleeding-edge 14A process — remains speculative rather than confirmed.
The use of optical communications in cloud AI data-center interconnect architectures is rising sharply, and Taiwan IC design firms including MediaTek, Realtek Semiconductor, Himax Technologies, and Elan Microelectronics are moving into the market from different angles, with mass production for their product lines all pointing to 2027.
The global memory industry has embraced a new business model over the past two quarters. Memory manufacturers are not only signing multi-year supply agreements with customers, but also requiring substantial cash deposits or other financial commitments as guarantees against future demand.
Nvidia and Broadcom outlined different paths for scaling AI networks at the OCP APAC Summit in Taipei on Aug. 11, as clusters expand from rack-scale systems to entire data centers and across multiple sites.