Silicon photonics: "The excitement has gone"

The opinion of industry analysts regarding silicon photonics is mixed at best. More silicon photonics products are shipping but challenges remain.

Part 1: An analyst perspective

"The excitement has gone,” says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting Market Research. “Now it is the long hard work to deliver products.” 

Dale Murray, LightCounting

However, he is less concerned about recent setbacks and slippages for companies such as Intel that are developing silicon photonics products. This is to be expected, he says, as happens with all emerging technologies.

Mark Lutkowitz, principal at consultancy fibeReality, is more circumspect. “As a general rule, the more that reality sets in, the less impressive silicon photonics gets to be,” he says. “The physics is just hard; light is not naturally inclined to work on the silicon the way electronics does.”

Click to read more ...

Is the tunable laser market set for an upturn?

Part 2: Tunable laser market

"The tunable laser market requires a lot of patience to research." So claims Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting Market Research. Kozlov should know; he has spent the last 15 years tracking and forecasting lasers and optical modules for the telecom and datacom markets.

Source: LightCounting, Gazettabyte

The tunable laser market is certainly sizeable; over half a million units will be shipped in 2014, says LightCounting. But the market requires care when forecasting. One subtlety is that certain optical component companies - Finisar, JDSU and Oclaro - are vertically integrated and use their own tunable lasers within the optical modules they sell. LightCounting counts these as module sales rather than tunable laser ones.

Click to read more ...

Reporting the optical component & module industry

LightCounting recently published its six-monthly optical market research covering telecom and datacom. Gazettabyte interviewed Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of LightCounting, about the findings.

When people forecast they always make a mistake on the timeline because they overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate in the long term.

Click to read more ...

Does Cisco Systems' CPAK module threaten the CFP2?

Cisco Systems has been detailing over recent months its upcoming proprietary optical module dubbed CPAK. The development promises to reduce the market opportunity for the CFP2 multi-source agreement (MSA) and has caused some disquiet in the industry.

Source: Cisco Systems, Gazettabyte, see comments

Click to read more ...

60-second interview with .... Vladimir Kozlov

A Q&A with Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting. The first of occassional quick interviews with industry figures. 

"You have to look over a longer time frame to understand the industry and appreciate the progress"

Click to read more ...

Is optical components becoming a buyer's market?

Despite warnings that price cutting could erode the margins of high-valued optical components, analysts explain why they remain upbeat about the market's prospects.

"An organisation's gross margins ride on these new products"

Daryl Inniss, Ovum Components.

Click to read more ...

Plotting transceiver shipments versus traffic growth

Chart Watch: LightCounting

Summing transceiver shipments in the core of the network and plotting the data against traffic growth provides useful insights into the state of the network.

"We use transceiver shipment data [from vendors] to calculate how fast the network is growing and compare it to the traffic growth," says Vladimir Kozlov, CEO of market research firm, LightCounting.

Click to read more ...