Coherent European Conference on Optical Communication 2026 (ECOC 2026)

Good evening, everybody. It's so great to see all of you here, so many familiar faces. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Sanjai Parthasarathi. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of Coherent. We are so excited that all of you could join us here in person, and those of you who are joining us by webcast for our launch of our PhotonLink platform. PhotonLink is our integrated optics platform, purpose-built for AI data center connectivity. Before we get started, I'll have to refer you to slide 2 of our presentation, which contains our forward-looking statements and disclosures. The presentation in its entirety will be available in the investor relations section of our website after the event. Moving on to an agenda. We've got a great program for you today. Jim Anderson, our CEO, will start us off by introducing PhotonLink.

Jim will be followed by Beck Mason, EVP of Semiconductor Devices, who will present the generate section of PhotonLink. Beck will be followed by Julie Sheridan Eng, our EVP of Optical Components and our CTO, who will present the shape, guide, and receive sections of the PhotonLink. Julie will also present our integrated solutions. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Jim Anderson, our CEO, to the stage.

All right. Thank you, Sanjai, and thank you everybody for being with us here today. We've been really excited about the launch of PhotonLink. We've been looking forward to this for a long time. Thanks. We're here in Spain at ECOC. Thanks to everybody that's joining us on the webcast, but thank you especially for everybody that's joining us here in this room because there is a beautiful sunny beach about 200 meters away from this location. The fact that you chose to sit in this conference room instead of on a sunny beach, I appreciate it. There are a few people that walked in with flip-flops and shorts. Again, thanks for being with us here today. We're really excited to share this with you. Just to kick it off, what is the motivation? Why are we launching PhotonLink?

The motivation or the reason for us to launch PhotonLink is very simple. It's to try to make it as easy as possible for our customers to move from electrical connections to photonic connections in the data center, to make that transition seamless and easy to bring the complete solution to our customers. If you look at any particular distance of links in data centers, if you look at long distances connecting two data centers, if you look at the very short distances connecting maybe two chips that are sitting right next to each other on a board, regardless of the distance, as you increase the data rate, as you increase the amount of bandwidth you're trying to send through that connection, if it's an electrical connection, you'll eventually hit the limit to that connection.

You will want to do is you will have to convert to a PhotonLink in order to achieve the data rate and the data transmission goals that you are trying to achieve. That is what PhotonLink is all about, is making that transition from electrical to photonic link as easy as possible. If you look at the data center today, actually a lot of the data center is already completely optical photonic. The telecom network, the scale-across, the scale-out networks, all of those originally started out as electrical networks but were long ago converted to photonic optical networks. Over the coming years, we will start to convert the only remaining electrical portions of the network. The scale-up network and even the chip-to-chip links will become photonic over the coming years. That is what we are really excited about, helping our customers make that transition.

Now, for Coherent, that is also a big opportunity for us. When we look out at the end of this decade, at 2030, if we look at our addressable market, it is about $60 billion for the existing portfolio products that we have. What PhotonLink does is it allows us to access another $30 billion of integrated optics market opportunity by the end of this decade. So another reason we are really excited about this technology. Now, as we have engaged with customers across integrated optics over the past months, actually, the level of engagement and the intensity of engagement, the number of engagements with customers over just the last 6 to 12 months has ramped up really significantly. We have got a number of different engagements across many different architectures. It is very clear to us that there is not just a one size fits all, one particular architecture that will be implemented.

We are going to see a wide range of different architectures that our customers are going to implement as they implement integrated optics. Some customers will adopt CPO right away. Some customers will first adopt NPO and then over time, move to CPO later on. We are already engaged with a number of customers talking about photonic links between the individual chips themselves. So a lot of different architectural options that we are working on with our customers. Regardless of those architectural options, one of the things that our customers are struggling with is if you look at the amount of optical technology that needs to be pulled together, there is a significant amount of complexity there. That is a combination of laser sources, the fiber optic cable that has to be pulled together, the complex optical assemblies, passive optics. A lot of technology has to be stitched together.

A number of our customers came to us and asked us, "Hey, rather than just providing components or a subset of components, can you bring the complete optical solution, the complete assembly, to make it easier for us to transition to optical?" That is exactly the purpose of PhotonLink, is to bring a single integrated platform that is architecture agnostic, that works across CPO, NPO, chip-to-chip as well, but brings the whole solution to our customers. When we look at PhotonLink, it spans all the way from the beginning, where we generate the photon, through the shaping and guiding of that signal, to the detection of the signal on the other end. So that is the complete PhotonLink platform. Now, we believe that Coherent, more than any other company in the world, is best positioned to help our customers make this transition for a couple key reasons.

First of all, because there's no other company in the world that has that complete set of photonic optical technology. If you look across the generate, shape, guide, detect, and look at all the different optical connections, all the different optical technology that's required to make that happen, it's really only Coherent that's got that full portfolio that we can bring together, stitch together in a single solution. There's other vendors that provide the laser source. There's other vendors that provide maybe the fiber optic cable, but only Coherent has all that technology in-house, and that helps our customers innovate faster and get those optical connections to market much quicker. That's number one is the complete technology portfolio, but the second reason is the ability to manufacture that at tremendous scale, the scale that's required for data center.

If you look at complex optical components, complex optical assemblies, over the past years, we've delivered hundreds of millions of components and optical assemblies. Not just the full portfolio of technology, but the ability to ramp that quickly and ramp that at scale for our customers. An example of the complete solution that we can bring, not just the component ingredient technologies, is here I'm showing just an example of, this could be a CPO or an NPO example for a switch chip or a compute chip, using an external laser source.

In this example, we'd be bringing the complete external laser source, the complete optical assembly that goes from that ELS to the switch chip or the processor chip that it's supporting, and then the complete optical assembly that goes back out to the faceplate to provide the I/O, the photonic I/O, to the rest of the system. That complete set of solutions and all the underlying components that go into that, and we can manufacture that at scale. We have anchor customers already secured for both CPO as well as NPO architectures. We'll talk a little bit more about that.

To give you an idea of the value of the content that we can bring, if we're using the full PhotonLink solution, if we take, for instance, a switch chip or a processor chip that, let's say, needs 100 terabit of I/O capacity, and let's say we're using 200 gig optical lanes, the content for Coherent would be up to about $15,000 per system or per 100T chip, in the case of where we're bringing all the content for the customer. A significant amount of content that we're delivering for our customers. We'll talk about today, of course, all the different ingredient technologies. I've got our two experts, Julie and Beck, to talk through all the ingredient technologies that are underneath PhotonLink. I think more importantly, what we'll also do is we'll talk about a number of specific examples that we're working on with customers, different architectures.

We'll show a CPO example, a couple different NPO examples, and a chip-to-chip example, too, of the solutions that we're bringing to our customers. Across these different architectural choices, a number of different types of light sources, whether it's CW lasers or VCSEL arrays, et cetera. As I mentioned earlier, the customer engagement across these different architectures has ramped up very significantly, especially over the last six months. We now have over 10 unique customer engagements on CPO, over 10 on NPO, and over five different engagements on chip-to-chip connections. A lot of activity across the customer base. I talked about how much content we're delivering in the case of when we bring the full solution. To give you an idea of the production timing, for CPO, our first production will start to ramp in our December quarter, this Q4 of this calendar year.

That initial CPO will ramp for scale-out applications. About a year later, in the second half of 2027, we'll start ramping CPO for scale-up applications. NPO similar, we expect that to start to ramp in the second half of next calendar year, again, primarily for scale-up applications. Chip-to-chip is a little further out there. We expect that to be further out in the 2029, 2030 timeline, but definitely a lot of intensity with our customers on designs around chip-to-chip photonic connections as well. A lot of customer activity going on. I'm going to pass it next to our two experts, Beck and Julie. What they're going to talk about is, think about it as two parts of their presentation.