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2024 Optical Fiber Conference

Mar 26, 2024

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Hello? Better. Ah, there we go.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Yeah.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

My name is still Paul Silverstein. So I want to, I'm Head of Investor Relations at Coherent. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you to Coherent's OFC Investor and Analyst Meeting. I want to thank all of you who are physically with us here in San Diego at the conference for joining us this morning at this event, which we're once again highlighting our optical communications business, especially with respect to the extraordinary exciting market inflection presented by AI. I also want to welcome those of you who are joining our live webcast, or who may be tuning into this webcast on some future date via the archive link that will be in the investor relations section of our website.

If you've not already done so, I also would encourage each of you to visit or revisit our previous Investor Communications Market webinar that we hosted on September 19th, 2023, which also is archived in the investor relations section of our website. We'll begin this morning's event with presentations by four executives from our leadership team. We'll have plenty of time following the presentations for Q&A from the audience. For those of you listening in on the webcast who would like to ask a question, please feel free to send your questions to me, paul.silverstein, S-I-L-V-E-R-S-T-E-I-N, @coherent.com, and I'll ask on your behalf. Presenting this morning will be the following Coherent executives in the order in which they're presenting: Dr. Sanjai Parthasarathy, our Chief Marketing Officer, Dr. Julie Sheridan Eng, our Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Lee Xu, Executive Vice President, Datacom Transceivers .

Dr. Beck Mason, Executive Vice President, Telecommunications. Following the conclusion of their presentations, they'll be joined for the Q&A session by Dr. Chuck Mattera, our CEO and Chair, and Dr. Sunny Sun, President of our Networking segment. The presentations and Q&A session will be available for replay in the Investor Relations section of Coherent's website for 12 months. Please feel free to reach out to me following the event. I'd welcome any feedback that you may have. Feedback's welcome, positive feedback, doubly so. Before I turn it over to Sanjai, I need to address the customer disclosures. My apologies. I'd like to remind everyone on this call that this presentation contains forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations, including our expectations of future financial, operational results and growth, and the health, growth, and opportunities in the markets we serve.

That such statements are based on certain assumptions and contingencies, and involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements in the presentation or in previous disclosures. Risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in this presentation are set forth in slide three of the investor presentation, the company's annual report, and Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2023, and as may be identified in filings of the company. Coherent disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which, unless otherwise indicated in this presentation, speak only as of March 26, 2024. It is now my pleasure to turn the microphone over to Sanjai. Thank you. Thanks, Sanjai.

Sanjai Parthasarathi
CMO, Coherent

Thanks, Paul. Good morning. We are so glad you're all here. We are eager to share our excitement about our communications market opportunity, our positioning, and our competitive differentiation in this market through both our current and future innovative technologies and products. I will start with a communications market update, followed by a review of new products and the exciting demos at our booth, as well as our OFC speaking engagements. Let me first begin with our total available addressable market across all of our markets, our total addressable opportunity across all of our markets. Our four diversified markets are industrial, communications, electronics, and instrumentation. We just updated our market sizing.

We now estimate our current TAM across all of our markets to be almost $70 billion, and over the next five years, we expect this TAM to increase by almost 100% to $135 billion. We further segment our markets by defining verticals within each market. Our communications market, which is the focus of this event, includes our Datacom and Telecom verticals. Communications accounts for approximately 45% of our revenue, with a split within communications, approximately 70% Datacom and 30% Telecom. We provided deep insight into this market on our September 19, 2023, Investor Market webinar, which is out, archived on our website. If you've not already done so, I would encourage you to review the presentations. Our industrial market includes precision manufacturing, semiconductor capital equipment, display capital equipment, and aerospace and defense.

Industrial currently accounts for approximately 37% of our total revenue. Precision manufacturing, semi cap, and display capital equipment collectively account for the bulk of our industrial revenue, with each making a meaningful contribution. We provided in-depth insight into this market on our December 14, 2023, Investor Market webinar, which is also archived on our website. We segment our instrumentation market, which accounted for 9% of our second quarter fiscal 2024 revenue into life sciences and scientific instrumentation verticals. We plan to address this market in detail on our next Investor Market webinar, which is currently scheduled for May 14, 2024. Our electronics market, which accounted for 8% of our second quarter fiscal 2024 revenue, consists of our consumer electronics and automotive electronics verticals. Communications is our largest market, measured by, by SAM, by TAM, by SAM, and by revenue.

Communications accounted for 46% of our revenue last quarter. We are a well-recognized innovation leader in the communications market and have led the market for many years in terms of market share. We enjoy leading positions in both Datacom and Telecom, and we leverage many of our key materials and compound semiconductor platforms across both these verticals. For example, gallium arsenide as a platform enables both terrestrial and submarine pumps in Telecom, as well as VCSELs and detectors for Datacom. Another example is our indium phosphide platform, which enables EMLs, DFB modulator, continuous wave lasers for Datacom, AI applications, as well as enables our photonic integrated platforms for coherent transceivers in Telecom. Owing in part to the fact that about 2.6 billion people, a 1/3 of the global population, are still not connected to the internet, the demand for bandwidth remains insatiable.

The metaverse, powered by immersion technology and IoT devices, enabled by AI-generating data, are two examples of applications that drive the demand for bandwidth. The applications of tomorrow are coming at us very quickly, and the bandwidth demand far outstrips capacity. We segment our communications market into Datacom and Telecom verticals. All the connectivity within the data center or data center intra connects, we classify under Datacom. All parts of the communications network outside of the data center, including submarine, long-haul, metro, and access networks and data center interconnects, we classify under Telecom. We estimate that the Datacom and Telecom markets combined represent, for us, a served available market opportunity of $17 billion in calendar 2024, which we estimate is enjoying a 17% or going to enjoy a 17% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, increasing to $37 billion in calendar 2029.

The beyond market growth, we continue to expand our communication SAM by entering new market opportunities, including coherent transceivers, disaggregated systems, and our recently announced optical circuit switch. Each of these three market opportunities offer the potential for attractive incremental growth along with attractive attending margins. We think we have extremely strong solutions to address and gain meaningful traction in each. I, along with Beck and Lee, will address each of these in greater detail later on this morning. With the extraordinary growth of AI clusters, we continue to see internet content providers, or ICPs, ratchet up their capital investments in building out their optical network infrastructure. Their optical infrastructure investments not only just include transceivers for connecting servers and switches within the data center and along with OCS for data center interconnect or DCI, but also for metro, long-haul, submarine, and even satellite networks.

Coherent offers solutions that address all of these market segments. We've been the market leader in Datacom transceivers for three decades. We are vertically integrated and offer all the leading-edge technology platforms, including gallium arsenide and indium phosphide lasers, as well as integrated platforms such as silicon photonics. We have climbed the experience curve. Julie and Lee will talk more about our technology and market leadership position in the industry. Turning to Datacom, AI has rapidly emerged as an explosive driver of Datacom transceivers. Last week, we all witnessed a revolutionary announcement by the market leader in AI systems, which further reinforces our market outlook. While the basic architecture remains the same, namely GPUs internally connected by electrical connections and externally connected by optical connections, the bandwidth of the new external optical connections is significantly increasing.

The previous state-of-the-art system, with four 800 Gbps optical transceiver ports, is now being replaced by a system with 36 1.6 Tbps optical transceiver ports, which represents a bandwidth growth of 18x per system. The arrival of generative AI, AI in 2022, late 2022, drove an inflection point in the Datacom market. We are one of the first-- We were one of the first to seize the impact of AI on the overall Datacom market, and we've been constantly refining our view of that impact ever since. Our comprehensive market analysis utilizes inputs from our customer value chain, our interpretation of customer systems architectures to arrive at GPU-to-transceiver ratios, as well as external market research. This chart shows the latest view, with a focus on higher speed transceivers, which drive the majority of the AI opportunity.

While our commercial launch of the 1.6T transceiver is not far off, we expect our 800G transceiver revenue to grow for years to come, with overlapping growth in both 1.6 and 800G, consistent with previous transceiver adoption cycles in the Datacom market. Moving to Telecom, I want to return to our robust effort to expand our SAM. Transceivers with coherent modulation technology are the largest part of that expansion. Industry analysts project the current transceiver market will grow at a 20% five-year CAGR from $3.8 billion in calendar 2023 to over $8.7 billion in calendar 2028. We are entering this market with products that offer a compelling value proposition. We are leveraging our vertical integration with our industry-leading indium phosphide platform, as well as our new DSP platform, to offer uniquely differentiated products.

In turn, customers are leveraging our innovative products to create new markets and applications. The number and the quality of our customer design wins for our coherent transceivers, especially for our new 100G ZR QSFP-DD transceiver, which leverages our internally developed Steelerton DSP, underlie our confidence in our ability to drive market penetration and accompanying strong incremental revenue growth. Beck will talk more about those innovations and outstanding customer reception for the same. A relatively new trend in Telecom networks is disaggregation. Disaggregation is gaining increasing momentum. Disaggregation promises to help operators reduce cost and broaden their supply chain through standardization and multi-vendor interoperability. As a general proposition, service providers and data center operators want to avoid vendor lock-in and to be able to build Telecom networks using products from a mix of vendors, the same way web scalers build data center networks.

With the broadest and the most vertically integrated portfolio in the industry, we are well positioned to address this market. Offering the potential to further meaningfully expand our Data com SAM, yesterday, we announced our brand-new optical circuit switching, or OCS, platform for data center networks. We estimate the OCS market, which is currently a multi-hundred million dollar market, to grow to over a billion dollars over the next few years. Our differentiated offering, combined with our expertise and decades of experience with our liquid crystal WSS platform and our vertical integration, strongly positions us for this opportunity. Let me spend the next few minutes reviewing what promises to be our best OFC ever. We are in booth 3412, right by the main entrance. We kicked it off yesterday at what has always been OFC's headline event, the Executive Forum.

As in years past, extremely well attended. Chuck was at the CEO panel, where he spoke about how we have executed on our decade-long strategy to cement our position as the largest optical component supplier with the broadest and the most vertically integrated portfolio in the industry. Yesterday evening, we received three awards from Lightwave Innovation, including two of our differentiated 800G components and transceivers. Our differentiation and innovation is critical to our coherent transceiver market position and revenue growth. Beck will cover our innovation that led to these awards later this morning. We announced 11 new product platforms, many of which we are demonstrating at our booth.

Please do come to our booth and see these demos of our differentiated offerings, including our unique 100G ZR coherent transceiver, featuring our in-house DSP for outside plant applications, our 800G DCO transceiver, and our 800G DR4 LPO transceiver, featuring the first of its kind, DFB Mach-Zehnder laser, which can address links up to 10 km. Julie will discuss more about that innovation in greater detail. We innovate at all levels of the value chain, from materials to optics, to components, to systems. Our products at OFC include optical building blocks, such as grisms, micro lens arrays, all of these new products, BiDi adapters, and so on. We are excited about our six-inch indium phosphide platform and our breakthrough on our path to the 200G VCSEL, which promises to be a game changer for AI connectivity.

At 12:30 P.M. today, I will be moderating a session on component platforms for AI networks, which will feature our own Vipul Bhatt, VP Datacom Marketing, who's here. Joining us on this panel will be Cedric Lam, Google's Director of Infrastructure, and Craig Thompson, NVIDIA's Vice President of the Networking Group, among others. I'm sure it's going to be a lively session, especially after last, last week's announcements by NVIDIA and all the excitement it represents for the optical community. We continue to lead the industry in innovation, and our extremely talented team, our extremely talented technical team, will be presenting at various technical sessions throughout the week. Thank you for your attention, and with that, I will turn it over to Julie.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Thanks, Sanjai. Hi, everybody. I'm Julie Sheridan Eng. I am the Chief Technology Officer of Coherent, and today I'm going to talk about our technologies inside of our Data com products, which, as Sanjai mentioned, are contributing materially to the data center build-out of artificial intelligence or AI. So let me start first with a bit of background. AI requires training on data sets, which can contain billions or even trillions of parameters. This requires significant compute capacity, which can be provided by tens of thousands of processors simultaneously. To address these new requirements, data centers are adding new equipment specific to machine learning and AI, and in this AI portion of the network, significant amount of information must be transferred between processing units such as GPUs and TPUs.

To enable this, the GPUs and TPUs are interconnected in a dense grid with electrical connections within the rack and fiber optic connections through transceivers for beyond the rack. In this way, the fiber optic transceivers are playing a critical role in the build-out of the AI network inside the data center. The speed of transceivers is critical to the performance of the network. Today, transceivers are shipping with 100G per lane components. Transceivers can use either four lanes or eight lanes of 100G to create 400G or 800G transceivers. We and others have also demonstrated 200G per lane components, which can support 800G with four lanes, 1.6T with eight lanes, and even up to 3.2T with 16 lanes of 200G.

Network upgrades and architectural changes to address artificial intelligence and machine learning are driving us and the industry to introduce higher speed transceivers at a faster pace than ever before. This requires tremendous innovation in high-speed components and especially semiconductor lasers. Coherent is one of the only transceiver manufacturers that is materially participating in the AI build-out that also designs and manufactures lasers in-house. Our multi-decade strategic investments give us a unique level of vertical integration and differentiated capability. W hy do we develop and manufacture lasers in-house? The primary reasons are, first, to provide value and extract returns at all levels of the manufacturing chain. Second, this allows us to control our own supply chain for this critical component. Third, we have the ability to innovate and lead with technology-driven products.

F inally, we're able to offer our customers differentiated capacity for their supply chain risk management, which is very valuable and makes us more valuable to our customers. W e develop several types of laser devices. Why don't we use a single laser for all reaches? And the reason for that is we need to optimize for power consumption and cost. So we start with the lowest cost, lowest power-consuming device, and then we only transition to a higher cost, higher power-consuming device when it's required by the application, which is generally as the data rate increases, fiber length increases, or the fiber loss distance increases. The lowest cost, most energy-efficient laser for Datacom applications is the gallium arsenide Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser or VCSEL.

Many of the links in the AI network are shorter than 50 m, and the gallium arsenide VCSEL is a great fit for that application. Beyond 50 m, the signal from a VCSEL over multimode fiber begins to degrade, so we need to move to other technologies, including indium phosphide and silicon photonics, to support 500 m links to 10 km links, which can connect switches together, or switches to routers, or routers to routers. Why do we use indium phosphide for some applications and silicon photonics for others? Generally speaking, indium phosphide has higher optical output power and better modulator efficiency, so it makes it a best fit for the highest speed and most challenging applications. silicon photonics can offer advantages by allowing the integration of compact, passive optical components. So in links where silicon photonics can meet the specifications, it can be smaller size and lower cost.

It's important to note that it's not an either/or with silicon photonics and indium phosphide, it's an and. This is because silicon does not lase, so every silicon photonics-based transceiver will contain an indium phosphide high-power laser to provide the light. Because we have all the technologies in-house, we're able to objectively compare and select the best technology for the application, which is a differentiator for Coherent. We're one of the pioneers in VCSELs and one of only two high-speed Datacom VCSEL manufacturers. We're also a leader in VCSEL-based transceivers, which account for a significant portion of the AI market opportunity. Coherent has multiple six-inch gallium arsenide VCSEL fabs in the U.S. and in Europe. We're the only Datacom VCSEL manufacturer in the world with a six-inch vertically integrated platform, which we believe provides significant cost and volume advantages.

We're one of the highest volume manufacturers of VCSELs in the world. Last August, we announced that we've shipped over 200 billion VCSEL emitters for Sensing and Datacom. Our 100G per lane VCSELs are in production to support 400G and 800G transceivers and are experiencing a significant high-volume production ramp, primarily for AI applications. Beyond 100G per lane, we are nearing the physical limitations of directly modulated lasers, and a 200G per lane VCSEL is a significant challenge. But we were the first in the industry to announce that we think a 200G per lane VCSEL was possible last March at OFC 2023. Here at OFC 2024, we have a technical paper showing our results from a new VCSEL platform called the Oxide-Free Lithographic VCSEL.

We developed this new platform because we believe it has strong potential to achieve the bandwidth necessary to support 200 G per lane. If we're successful in our commercialization effort, we expect 200 G per lane VCSEL-based transceivers to gain strong customer interest and adoption for short-reach AI links. Coherent is also a leader in indium phosphide lasers and transceivers. We have multiple indium phosphide fabs in the U.S. and in Europe. Our indium phosphide technology platform has been field-proven at scale, with more than 200 million Datacom lasers deployed in the field over two decades. Our indium phosphide lasers have been deployed and qualified by virtually every network OEM and hyperscaler in the world, and we leverage that deep expertise to develop lasers to support longer-reach 800 G and 1.6 T transceivers.

For reaches 500 m to 10 km, electroabsorption modulated lasers are often used. We manufacture 100G per lane EMLs to support 400G and 800G transceivers, such as our EML-based 800G DR8 transceiver, which we've demonstrated publicly. We've also publicly demonstrated our 200G per lane EML, for which we received the Lightwave Innovation Reviews Award. As we in the industry transition to 200G per lane and 1.6T transceivers, we introduced our newest laser technology, called the DFB-MZ, and this stands for Distributed Feedback Laser with Mach-Zehnder. This is an indium phosphide laser, monolithically integrated with an indium phosphide Mach-Zehnder modulator, which is a very advanced photonic integrated circuit. We believe this new laser technology will be valuable for 1.6T, 10 km reach, and also linear pluggable optics, or LPO.

We demonstrated an 800G FR4 OSFP based on the DFB-MZ at the European Conference on Optical Communications, or ECOC, in 2023, and here at OFC 2024, as Sanjai said, we're demonstrating an 800G DR4, which is four by 200G, LPO OSFP based on the DFB-MZ. We won the ECOC Industry Most Innovative Product Award for the DFB-MZ, and this is an example of the competitive advantage provided by our internal component capability. We're also very excited to announce that we are bringing up six-inch indium phosphide lasers in both our Järfälla, Sweden, fabrication facility and in our high-volume, state-of-the-art fabrication facility in Sherman, Texas. We expect to be the first to six-inch indium phosphide, which gives us lower cost and also added capacity to support the growing needs for indium phosphide for AI.

I brought a little demo for you all, which I'll hold up here. So this is a three-inch indium phosphide wafer of lasers, and here is six-inch. So what you see is, you get a lot more lasers per wafer, which will give us a lot of. We believe that investment will position us as the vendor of choice in indium phosphide for Datacom and AI. We also have a strong position in silicon photonics-based transceivers. Our position in silicon photonics is based on over a decade of in-house silicon photonics investments and technology development starting in 2010. By 2014, we demonstrated the industry's first 50G NRZ end-to-end link based on internally designed silicon photonics. For many generations of products, we determined that gallium arsenide and indium phosphide offered meaningful advantages compared to silicon photonics-based solutions.

Over time, as transceivers became multi-channel and as parallel single-mode fiber applications emerged, and as we entered the coherent optics transceiver market for Telecom, we started shipping silicon photonics-based products in production. We have an in-house silicon photonics design team, and we rely on tier-one foundries, as is common in the silicon industry. Like our integrated circuit design teams, we differentiate ourselves based on design, and we have many patents on our silicon photonics designs. We have sampled 800G transceivers based on silicon photonics to tier one customers, and in addition, we showed our 200G per lane silicon photonics eyes at ECOC last year. We have developed and are manufacturing in-house indium phosphide, high-power lasers for silicon photonics.

We're making these lasers commercially available in the market, and we'll leverage them for our own transceiver designs, such as our silicon photonics-based 800G DR8 transceiver that we have demonstrated publicly. Transceivers are transitioning to higher speeds at a faster pace than ever before. We and others are shipping 800G transceivers based on 100G per lane lasers in production, and we expect to ship our first 1.6T transceivers based on 200G per lane lasers this year. We're one of the few vendors in this space that has the technology and the manufacturing scale to keep pace. But what happens after 200G and 1.6T? We believe that most of our customers will transition to 3.2T pluggable transceivers by adding additional lanes, rather than by increasing the data rate per lane.

W e believe the 200G per lane lasers and optics we're developing today will support the development of 3.2T pluggable transceivers, which should serve the industry for the next five plus years. But what's beyond that 200G per lane and 3.2T transceivers? As usual, the industry will come together through standards and multi-source agreements to establish a few options and arrive at a few competing solutions. It's likely that either the number of lanes will increase, the line rate will increase to 400G, or more complex signal modulation will be used, and each of these paths is possible, and each of them is challenging in their own way. There's been discussion for the past decade about coherent optics inside the data center.

For clarity here, I'm referring to coherent optics with a small C, rather than coherent, the company. While coherent optics provides more capacity per channel, it requires more complex optics, consumes more energy, and is higher cost than direct detect or non-coherent solutions. So just as we use a waterfall of laser solutions, starting with the lowest cost, lowest power-consuming solution, and transitioning to a higher cost, higher power-consuming solution only when required, we think the same will be true of coherent optics. We see a path to 3.2T 10 km direct detect pluggable transceivers, which we think will serve the industry for the next five plus years.

If at some point in the future, coherent optics is lower cost, lower power consumption, and smaller size than the other options, or if coherent optics is the only way to achieve a certain distance at a certain data rate, then we and others in the industry will implement it. But if this happens, we will have an excellent position, given we are one of the few major Data com suppliers that also makes coherent optics transceivers. Our 100G ZR QSFP28 DCO that Sanjai mentioned, that coherent receiver is an excellent example of how we are using our internal capabilities to decrease the cost, size, and power consumption of coherent optics solutions. So while we don't see coherent optics in the data center as a near-term trend for Data com, if and when this does happen, we will be in a strong position to support it.

There's also significant industry discussion about linear pluggable optics or LPO, linear receive optics or LRO, as well as near packaged optics or NPO, and co-packaged optics or CPO. It's important to note that these are different implementations, can be thought of as packaging and architectural partitioning changes compared to traditional retimed optics, and all the underlying component technologies remain largely the same. So for this reason, our internally designed components can support LPO, LRO, NPO, and CPO, and when these implementations emerge, we'll be ready to support them. Based on customer interest, we are developing LPO products. We have demonstrated an 800G DR8 LPO based on 100G per lane at ECOC last year, and here at OFC we are showing our 800G DR4 LPO based on 200G per lane. We've actually been shipping VCSEL-based NPO for over a decade.

In terms of CPO, we see the market evolving into optical chiplets, which can contain the modulator, detector, optics, optical packaging, and integrated circuit, which is much like an LPO pluggable transceiver, just in a much smaller package. For very short reach CPO, we believe gallium arsenide VCSELs will continue to have a place in the ecosystem, owing to their low cost, low power consumption, and ease of integration into parallel modules supporting many lanes. At last year's OFC, we demonstrated a VCSEL-based CPO that we developed with IBM through a contract with ARPA-E. Under that program, we delivered an 800G VCSEL-based CPO chiplet in a very small package of 13 mm by 13 mm by 4 mm, and we are currently extending that work to 3.2T. For longer reach co-packaging, indium phosphide high-power lasers will be used, likely with silicon photonics.

This implementation is generally shown as silicon photonics co-packaged with a switch or processor chip, with a remote indium phosphide high-power laser connected to the co-packaged chip through optical fiber. We at Coherent are working on high-power indium phosphide lasers, silicon photonics, and compact optical packaging. These can be combined either into pluggable transceivers or optical chiplets for co-packaging. When the co-packaging market emerges, we will be ready. While NPO and CPO are hot topics, we believe we will see the industry innovate around pluggable optics paradigm as long as possible, as we've already seen with the LPO and LRO. We believe that pluggable transceivers will support the industry needs through the rest of this decade. While we do see co-packaging as a trend for the future, it's important to understand the value pluggable transceivers bring to our customers.

First, there's a rich ecosystem of transceiver manufacturers that support these standardized interfaces, which creates competition and economies of scale. Second, pluggable transceivers can be added as needed, enabling the so-called pay-as-you-grow model. Third, pluggable transceivers offer flexibility, enabling our customers to use lower cost, lower power-consuming links for shorter links, and higher reach, longer reach transceivers for longer links without committing to a configuration upfront. And finally, pluggable transceivers also offer an easy replacement as needed, offering flexibility to our customers. As a leader in transceiver for over two decades, we expect to continue to innovate, to remain a technology leader, and to deliver volume solutions to our customers to enable data center and AI networks that meet their needs. W e're excited to be part of the hardware solution that is helping to bring forth the power of artificial intelligence. Now, let me turn it over to Lee.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Well, thank you, Julie. Good morning. My name is Lee Xu, and I want to thank you for the honor of presenting our Datacom business today. I'm excited to share our vision and strategy with you. Let's go to next. Yeah. So our Datacom business is a vital growth engine for Coherent. We expect substantial growth for 800G in fiscal 2024 and beyond. With our firm development commitment for 1.6T technologies, we see the potential to more than double our revenue, Datacom revenue, in the next few years. I'm here eager to showcase our unique strengths and competitive advantages. Today, my focus will be on the exceptional AI-driven growth over the next several years. It's really a singular opportunity for us.

Leveraging the collective strengths of our company, we're poised to meet this challenge. Julie and Sanjai have already addressed various aspects of the AI market, including applications and technologies. I will delve into our accelerating revenue growth in 800G, a key driver of our growth in the near term, and then I will outline our product and technological advancements aimed at enabling us to exceed the future AI market growth. Okay. We enjoy a very long history of market leadership, as evidenced in this slide, which presents our Datacom revenue over the past 18 years, and also offers a glimpse into the future. Our journey from leading the shift from 10G to 100G and then to 200G and 400G transceivers underscores our industry leadership.

In fiscal 2023, our 200G and 400G sales constituted over half of our Datacom revenue, really positioning us at the industry's forefront. Our consistent growth, especially since the acquisition of Finisar in September 2019, has solidified our leadership in the transceiver market. With the emergence of AI, we expect an even more rapid expansion starting 2024. All right. O ur portfolio really encompasses every key variants of 800G products that the market demands, from short to long reach. We are aggressively ramping our 800G transceiver shipment and revenue.

Having only commercially launched our 800G product transceiver approximately a little bit over a year ago, our 800G revenue sequentially grows, increased by over 100%, to over $100 million in our most recent December fiscal quarter, following over 200% sequential growth in our first fiscal quarter. That's the September quarter last year. Looking ahead, we expect our 800G revenue to increase by roughly 3x to $450 million in the second half of this fiscal year, fiscal 2024, from approximately $150 million in the first half.

We expect our 800G transceiver revenue to continue to grow long after we commence the shipment of 1.6T transceivers in the second half of calendar year 2024. Yeah, slide 46. Helping to fuel this expected long-term 800G revenue growth, this slide shows our high-level product family roadmap. We have launched our mainstream 800G products based on cutting-edge 100G per lane optical and electrical technologies. As this slide indicates, we will be enhancing our 800G product portfolio with 800G transceivers based on 200G per lane lasers and other optical components, which also should reduce the cost of our bill of materials.

As also indicated on the slide, we will have 800G products that specifically address the linear pluggable optics. Julie mentioned that early on. We expect to commercially launch both of these new 800G products later this calendar year. As Julie also reviewed, we do not see meaningful, if any, risk posed by LPO or CPO for that matter should either of these technologies gain eventual adoption from customers. As previously noted, we expect our 800G transceiver revenue to ramp for years to come even as we commence shipping and ramping our 1.6T generation. Our ambitious goals do not stop here.

We are hard at work on 1.6T products, which we expect to start shipping by end of this calendar year or early next year. We also have already commenced exploring 3.2T and co-packaged technologies, as Julie indicated earlier. Slide 47 showcases the cornerstone technologies for our success. Julie addressed a lot of that. I want to say that our differentiated transceiver design and laser technologies are set to further enhance our industry leadership position in the 1.6T generation. Our diverse customer base, each with unique architectural designs and needs, demands a very versatile approaches, and ranging from silicon photonics to EMLs, to DFB-MZ. It's essentially DFB modulator and even VCSELs, right?

That catering to a variety of application scenarios, such as connectivity length and system architectures, for this next 1.6T and 3.2T generation. Our internal design team is at the industry forefront, proving that silicon photonics can achieve 200G per lane. Our fab in Sweden produces EML lasers, which are pivotal to our 400G and 800G single mode transceiver shipment right now. With a head start in Sweden for the DFB Mach-Zehnder laser technology, known for its superior distance coverage and linearity, and the potential for even higher bandwidth, we're pushing the boundaries. Our 100G per lane VCSELs are already on the market in mass, and with 200G per lane versions in development. All right.

As set forth on slide 48, we're very excited to introduce here at OFC 2024 a new product we call it Optical Circuit Switch. Julie and both Julie and Sanjai talk about this. We call it OCS, just to abbreviate, right? And enhancing our AI-driven market opportunity, this product offers the potential for very meaningful incremental revenue increase for our Datacom vertical market. Based on industry analysts' estimates, OCS is currently already a multi-hundred million dollar market that could grow to over a billion in a few years. We plan to gain a very healthy share of this market opportunity.

In addition to conferring a competitive performance advantage, our vertical integration of liquid crystal design and fabrication, plus other advanced electronics and micro-optics, all these should enable a very profitable product for us. Interest in this OCS for data center and AI applications really has increased dramatically in the past year, after a technical paper published showing a 30% cost saving and 41% power saving using OCS relative to electrical switch, right? In addition to the cost and the power savings, unlike traditional switches, the OCS is data rate agnostic, right? And which offers data center and AI customers the ability to upgrade to new data rates without changing hardware. And that is a significant advantage compared to electrical switching.

While our OCS is a new platform, we think that we enjoy what we think as a significant competitive advantage. These include the long experience we have with this key underlying material technologies, which we think offers performance advantage over other OCS platforms. Most specifically, it's based on digital liquid crystal technology that we developed for our one of our wavelength selective switch products. We have shipped over 160,000 of these WSS systems, including for ultra-high reliability under sea applications. We have adopted this technology into our OCS product right now. T he advantages of this liquid crystal for particularly this application are intrinsically high reliability and low voltage electronics used. Altogether, they can result in high reliability and lower cost.

In this OFC, we're showing 300 port by 300 port live demo of this OCS in our booth. We're very excited to be able to extend our long history of innovation in liquid crystal technology to this exciting product space. Together with the transceivers, we can support the AI in the data center. Right. In the very fiercely competitive Datacom transceiver market, we've maintained our leadership for over 16 years, commanding a 20% plus market share, with excellent financial performance. Based on our projected 800G revenue growth for our third and fourth quarter of this fiscal year, we expect our share of the AI-driven 800G market to exceed 20%.

Our success is rooted in our scale, the breadth and depth of our product portfolio, and our broad customer base. Those provide us with significant leverage and economy of scale. Our prowess in transceiver level design made us a leader in the 800 G generation, and will further enhance our leadership position in 1.6 T. Right? Our vertical integration in design and manufacturing really give us advantage in cost and ramp-up speed. Our vertical integration on lasers allow us early and stable access to advanced devices, such as the current 100 G per lane VCSELs. So, our diversified manufacturing, characterized by high-quality systems, advanced automation, and efficient new product introduction, underpins our rapid scaling capability.

Our production expansion in China and more expansion outside of China, in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Philippines, are steps toward a global resilient manufacturing footprint, right? The fusion of Finisar's three decades of leadership with II-VI assets and mindsets, especially in the era of AI, underscores our technological and manufacturing excellence. This is a summary page. In summary, we see ongoing significant impact of AI on our Datacom business in terms of both magnitude and duration. We expect our commitment to innovation, particularly in 1.6T generation and laser advancement, to fuel our continued and even greater success. That's to drive our AI revenue growth above the AI market growth, right? And, as previously noted, we see the potential to more than double our Datacom transceiver revenue in the next few years.

For our launch of the optical circuit switch to generate significant incremental Datacom revenue, we're excited for the future. Thank you for your attention. I now turn to Beck.

Beck Mason
President of Telecommunications, Coherent

Sorry. I have to clean up after the previous speaker, so. Good morning, everyone. So my name is Beck Mason, and, I'm the EVP of the Telecommunications business at, at Coherent. So Coherent has been in the Telecommunications business for more than 30 years. O ver that time, has grown that business both through internal innovation and through the acquisition and integration of companies with critical enabling technologies. So our technology roots date back more than 30 years and include foundational IP developed at AT&T Bell Labs, Corning, Nortel Optoelectronics, Alcatel Optronics, Pirelli, IBM, and others.

Our acquisitions include Marlow, which brought industry-leading solid-state thermoelectric cooler technology, Photop, with its broad array of vertically integrated passive optical solutions, Faraday Rotators from Integrated Photonics, the Telecom pump laser, amplifier, and signal monitoring business from Oclaro, wavelength selective switch platforms from both CoAdna and Engana, and finally, indium phosphide lasers and optical transceivers and transmission components from Finisar. Telecom fiber optic networks cover a wide range of applications, from access networks at the edge that connect to homes and businesses, through to metro and long-haul core networks, which interconnect the data centers and central offices across the country, and finally, with subsea networks that connect them around the world. They also play a critical role in 4G and 5G wireless networks, where they support front haul and backhaul of the traffic.

Coherent produces the products that transmit and receive the information over those networks, enabling hundreds of separate optical transmission channels on individual wavelengths of light to be carried over a single fiber, with aggregate capacities into the several 10 Tbps . We produce the optical line system components that are used to add, drop, route, and switch these individual channels over the network. Our pump lasers and fiber amplifier products regenerate the signals and extend their reach over thousands of kilometers in long-haul applications, and our monitoring solutions enable the performance of these channels and the health of the fiber infrastructure to be managed effectively. Global internet traffic continues to grow at a healthy pace, driven by video, wireless, web services, machine-to-machine communication, and more recently, AI applications.

Today, there are more than five billion internet users and almost 30 billion network devices, while internet traffic is growing at 24% per year. The Telecom market experienced a slowdown in the second half of calendar 2023, and we are in the middle of that now, and we do not expect full current market recovery until the second half of 2024. Despite the slowdown, we expect our SAM to grow at a healthy 16% CAGR over the next five years coming out of our fiscal 2024. This is driven by the fact that we are well-positioned in two very high-growth segments.

The first is coherent transceivers, which is the largest segment in the Telecom space, is projected to grow at a 20% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, reaching a market size of $8.7 billion by 2028, as Sanjai showed in his presentation. The second is the disaggregated systems market. We have differentiated leading-edge technology that supports these solutions. This market is just over $3 billion today annually and projected to exceed $4.5 billion by 2027. These two areas are going to be the largest growth drivers in our Telecom business over the next five years. Coherent has one of the industry's broadest portfolios of technologies and products that power Telecom fiber optic networks. This portfolio breadth should allow us to fully benefit from Telecom market recovery.

We serve all segments from the edge, where subscribers are connected, through to the metro and core networks that interconnect them to the data centers that make up the cloud. Our products benefit our customers by simplifying their user experience, enabling them to reduce both capital and operational expense, while paving the way for the evolution of future networks and increased traffic that we expect them to carry. In all applications, customers value high performance, high reliability, smaller size, lower power consumption, and lower costs. Because of the realities of network operations and economics, we see a different emphasis on each of these attributes, depending on which section of the network is being served. For example, in access networks, cost, power dissipation, and physical size play a significant role in core networks. Spanning hundreds of thousands of kilometers, performance is key.

In submarine and space networks, high reliability becomes a factor of primary importance. Optical line systems comprise the base layer of fiber optic networks. We are a leader in this space, and our products cover all aspects of amplification, routing, switching, and monitoring in the network. Our amplifier technology is based on our industry-leading pump laser solutions and delivers best-in-class capability for receiver pre-amplification, transmitter booster applications, and low noise line amplification. We cover both C and L-band network requirements with both erbium and Raman capability. For routing and combining DWDM channels, we have fixed multiplexer and demultiplexer solutions, along with reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers based on our industry-leading LCOS WSS technology. In submarine applications, our ultra-low power, high reliability, liquid crystal-based WSS solutions are deployed in situations where reliability and low power dissipation are critical.

To help support these capabilities, we have the industry's most advanced solutions for monitoring and control. Our optical channel monitors can track hundreds of individual wavelength channels within the network to ensure their performance. Our most advanced optical channel monitor technology is based on coherent mixing and is unique in the marketplace due to its ultra-high resolution capability, enabling it to deliver features beyond the capabilities of traditional OCMs. Finally, in order to monitor and ensure the integrity of the fiber infrastructure, we have developed optical time domain reflectometry tools that can scan the fiber real-time, identify locations of breaks or excessive loss without disrupting live traffic. Increasingly, we combine many of these features together into integrated subsystems that support full node functionality for our customers. W e continue to advance our technology in a number of critical areas.

We expect these advances to confer meaningful competitive advantages, which in turn should lead to market share gains that will drive our Telecom revenue growth over and above market recovery. In the wavelength selective switch space, we are scaling to solutions that enable both C-band and L-band channels to be managed within a single device. This more than doubles the bandwidth capability of our products versus our competitors' solutions. On the amplifier side, we are leveraging our higher pump power capability to deliver more efficient amplifiers and to broaden their spectrum coverage so that more channels can be supported on a single fiber, moving from 4.8 THz solutions today to 5 THz and 6 THz solutions in the future in both the C-band and the L-band. This is increasing the total information carrying capacity of the fiber, and it lowers the cost of the network.

We have new optical channel monitoring technology that enables a single device to cover both C-band and L-band together, cutting the cost in half for monitoring these broader networks. Finally, on the pump laser front, where we continue to lead the industry in the highest power per pump emitter, we are now transitioning to designs where multiple pump lasers are integrated into a single package, yielding much more compact and efficient amplifier designs. Pump lasers are used to power the fiber amplifiers that boost the optical signals in virtually all Telecom networks worldwide. We have been in the pump laser business for 30 years and have shipped more than seven million devices to the field. Our output has grown more than 40% since 2018, and we are arguably the largest supplier in the industry.

Our 21 different laser platforms serve everything from ultra-small, single-channel booster applications for silicon photonic-based optical transceivers to very high power, greater than 1 W, single emitter and dual emitter solutions that support high-performance amplifiers used in C-band and L-band systems that can carry more than 100 wavelength channels. We have significantly enhanced our pump laser product portfolio, and we believe we have an industry-leading portfolio we expect to deliver steady revenue growth at strong gross margins. We continue to innovate with new and differentiated solutions. One of our most interesting products in the transport space is the Pluggable Optical Line System, which addresses the demand from network operators in connection with the emergence of IP over DWDM. Our POLS solution enables a full bidirectional amplifier and an 8-channel colorless combiner to be plugged into a transceiver port on a switch or router.

With the introduction of IP over DWDM approaches, network operators are using coherent transceivers plugged directly into their switch and router ports. This has created a demand for a compact, efficient solution to combine and amplify these signals. Our POLS product delivers this solution. It enables the functionality of a compact transport OLS chassis to be delivered in a pluggable module. The solution can serve the dual function of multiplexing and demultiplexing the optical wavelengths to and from the various pluggable transceivers in the router, then amplifying them for transmission over the network. We see the opportunity to generate significant incremental revenue from expansion of our solutions in the coherent optical transceiver market.

Coherent optical transceivers represent the largest and fastest-growing portion of our Telecom market, SAM, at $3.8 billion today with a CAGR of 20%. We are expanding our solutions in this market with meaningfully differentiated products that we believe position us well for success. Notwithstanding the strong existing suppliers and solutions in this key product segment, our early design wins, both in number and quality for our new products, reinforce our view. We especially note our new 100G ZR coherent transceiver that incorporates our Steelerton coherent DSP. This transceiver enjoys the advantage of extremely low power consumption and a QSFP28 form factor, which is the most compact form factor in the industry. This, in turn, allows for significantly greater faceplate density and bandwidth capacity relative to the prevailing competing CFP2 form factor.

Traditionally, Telecom networks relied on complex and expensive line cards to generate and detect the optical wavelengths that carry data over the network. Technology developments have enabled this capability to be implemented now in small, low-power, pluggable optical transceivers, and increasingly, these are becoming the primary solution for data center interconnects, metro, and edge applications. In edge access networks, our compact 10G Tunable SFP+ transceivers and our 100G QSFP28 coherent transceivers provide scalable, low power, and cost-effective solutions that can be deployed in central offices and in remote terminal applications.

For data center interconnect and metro applications, our high-performance coherent transceivers enable high-capacity networks that can operate over distances of 2,000 km or carry data rates as high as 800 Gbps on a single wavelength, and they deliver aggregate capacities up to 64 Tb on a single fiber if you use both extended C and extended L bands. Our strength overall is in the depth of the expertise we have in the critical enabling technologies for these transceivers.

From the indium phosphide and silicon photonic devices that generate, modulate, and detect the optical signals to the high-speed RF analog and digital ICs that are used to drive them, we support these fundamental building blocks with advanced packaging capabilities for integrating the photonics and electronic circuits, for coupling the light from the photonic components into the optical fiber, and for controlling the environment of the critical components. Our family of Telecom digital coherent optical transceivers include solutions for QSFP28 form factor at 100 Gbps ; for metro and edge applications, 400 G QSFP-DD solutions for ZR and ZR+ ; data center interconnect applications, and high-performance 800 G ZR and ZR + solutions in QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors. Every generation increases capacity and reach over the prior gen.

We are among the first to market with 800G coherent in a small form factor transceiver, and we will be demonstrating this product here at the OFC show. This platform can support distances of over 1,000 km at 800G and greater than 2,000 km when operated in its 400G mode. In addition to scaling up on capacity and reach with our transceiver products, we are also driving down the size and power dissipation of the solutions. Over three generations of solutions for 100G coherent transmission, we have reduced the power dissipation by 70% and the size by roughly a factor of four. This has been accomplished with our innovative low-power Steelerton digital signal processor chip and our compact tunable laser and silicon photonic COSA components. An important building block in a coherent transceiver is the digital signal processor.

This device converts digital data from a switch or router into the complex analog modulation signals that are used to transmit data over a fiber optic network. It also converts the received signal at the other end of the link back into digital data, and compensates for any signal impairments that occur over the fiber optic link. It's an important element in driving the overall performance of a coherent link, and it represents a significant portion of the cost of a coherent transceiver. We partner with leading vendors in the industry to leverage their DSP solutions for some of our products, and we design and develop our own custom DSP solutions with our internal design team. This enables us to cover a wide range of solutions. We focus our designs on advanced process nodes, which deliver the lowest power, smallest die size, and ultimately, the lowest cost solution.

This combination of external partnership and internal capability lets us focus our engineering efforts where we can best differentiate with unique approaches that extend our market and enhance our ability to deliver disruptive solutions. We're building on our launch of our Steelerton first coherent DSP with a number of additional coherent DSPs in development. Our internal DSP solutions not only give us a significant performance advantage, they also substantially reduce the cost of our products, delivering a 10-15 point improvement in the gross margin of our transceiver portfolio.

Our first generation DSP, Steelerton, was designed to dramatically lower the cost and power for 100G transceiver solutions, delivering close to a 60% reduction in power over prior generation devices and enabling a 100G solution in a QSFP28 form factor, something that had never been done before and still has not been done by anyone else yet. Our second generation DSP, Silverton, is still in development. This device will be almost 20 x the size and complexity of Steelerton and will use advanced 3 nm CMOS technology. This will deliver superior performance and power for 400G and 800G applications. Moving to 3 nm will give it a significant power and cost advantage over legacy 7-5 nm devices, which are used today. This allows us to enable greater capability in the device within the pluggable form factor.

This week at OFC, we will be demonstrating the industrial temperature version of our new 100G ZR QSFP28 DCO transceiver. It's the only coherent transceiver available today in the popular QSFP28 form factor, and now it's enabled by our compact tunable laser, advanced integrated silicon photonics coherent transmitter receiver, and our Steelerton DSP. It delivers breakthrough performance in a compact package, making it very popular among service providers and cable MSOs. This product is capable of operating over a 125 degrees Celsius temperature range from -40 to +85 degrees Celsius, which enables it to be deployed in remote terminal applications at curbside or on the pole. Has a capacity of up to 100 Gbps and a maximum reach of 300 km.

Increasingly, network operators are moving to IP over DWDM strategies, particularly in the data center interconnect and metro DWDM space. This approach enables coherent optical transceivers to be plugged directly into network routers and switches, bypassing the need for a separate transponder or muxponder solution. IP over DWDM can enable substantial cost savings for network operators, as it eliminates an entire layer of hardware and facilitates disaggregating the supply chain for coherent transceiver optics. This, in turn, significantly expands our market opportunities for coherent transceiver products. Coherent is a world leader in compound semiconductor wafer fabrication technology. For our Telecom products, we have indium phosphide and gallium arsenide wafer fabs in Zurich, Switzerland, and Stockholm, Sweden, respectively, that provide the photonic chips used in our Telecom and Datacom products.

In addition to Zurich and Järfälla, we have state-of-the-art production fabs for gallium arsenide and indium phosphide photonic devices in Fremont, California, and Sherman, Texas. This week, we announced the availability of six-inch indium phosphide fabrication in our Järfälla, Sweden, and Sherman, Texas, wafer fabs. We are the first in the industry to transition to this larger wafer size for photonic chips, and we will show an example of a six-inch device in our booth at OFC. Moving to six-inch enables us to access newer-generation automated equipment in our fabs, increasing yield and reducing processing costs. Our six-inch wafers deliver 4x the die per wafer of current-generation three-inch indium phosphide wafers and can deliver a 60% reduction in die cost. At Coherent, our strength is not just in our R&D and our technology, but also in our manufacturing capability.

We have vertically integrated manufacturing that spans all the way from the base device and component level to the module and subsystem level. Our production focus is on having geographic diversity of supply to ensure business continuity in the face of potential supply disruptions and to provide flexibility in country of origin to meet tariff and security-based sourcing concerns for our customers. Our internal photonic packaging production facilities rely on highly automated robotic assembly to ensure consistent quality and performance of our products and to enable high volume production with reduced labor and overhead costs. Our Telecommunications pump lasers are built in Shenzhen, China, and the Philippines. Our photonic components are manufactured in our automated facilities in Wuxi, China.

Our transceiver products are built in Wuxi, China, and in our factory in Ipoh, Malaysia, and we manufacture passive optics along with amplifiers, line cards, and other subsystem products in Fuzhou, China. We also have manufacturing locations in Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. We have an experienced manufacturing technology development team that is expert in assembly and test automation. Their capability enables us to automate most of the manufacturing stages of our production. The use of internally developed automation helps us minimize our capital expense and customize our solutions to best fit the requirements of our products. It also ensures more consistent product quality, less waste, and better manufacturing efficiency and cost. We pride ourselves on having one of the best quality reputations in the industry. We have a strong focus on continuous improvement in product quality, and we drive a zero-defect culture approach.

Finally, Coherent is one of the largest suppliers in the Telecommunications component market, and we leverage that scale to keep ahead in product design, manufacturing, technology, and product quality, so we can bring superior value and quality to our customers. The breadth of our technology portfolio in both transport and transmission applications allows us to bring to market vertically integrated solutions that are higher in performance, more cost-effective, and better optimized to work together in Telecom networks. Thank you.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Thanks, though. Does this mic work? No, it's not on. Once again. T here we go. Thanks, Beck. I want to thank Sanjai, Julie, Lee, and Beck. I thought those were great presentations. They, along with Chuck and Sunny, will now field your questions. We'll try. I know it's late. We're gonna try to answer all of your questions. We'll hold it. We were scheduled until 12. Hang on, hang on. I see you out there. We'll try to answer all of your questions. We're gonna keep it open beyond 12. But please, once again, for those of you listening in via the webcast, who would like to ask a question, please feel free to send your questions to me at paul.silverstein@coherent.com, and I'll ask on your behalf. And with that, we'll open up to questions.

Chris Rolland
Sr Equity Analyst in Semiconductors, Susquehanna

Thanks, guys. Chris Rolland, Susquehanna. You know, a lot of great opportunities, particularly in data center. I think you guys have been talking about ramping capacity for data center. I'd like kind of an update on those plans. But just more broadly, talking about, you know, call it VCSELs versus EMLs, what capacity need do you guys most have out there right now to address this? Yeah, and just talk about, you know, just kind of where you guys are kind of behind the curve or are you getting your competitor today talked about capacity reservation fees. Are you gonna have something similar? Would love to know just kind of the state of the ramps and the various opportunities you guys have in terms of capacity?

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Lee, why don't you take it?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Yeah. Well, thanks for the question. First of all, we're ramping up both on the VCSEL-based transceivers and the EML-based transceivers, and some of the silicon photonics-based transceivers. So all of that are in ramping, and we did say in this show, saying that, "Hey, particularly on 800G, we're roughly $50 million shipment in Q1, $100 million in Q2, and Q3 and Q4 combined is going to be $450 million. A s you can see, that's quite a ramp, right? And we see this demand is quite broad-based, and we hope that we can continue for many years to come.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Chris, you're good?

Chris Rolland
Sr Equity Analyst in Semiconductors, Susquehanna

Yeah.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Great. Go ahead, Karl.

Karl Ackerman
Managing Directors of Semiconductors and Networking Hardware, BNP Paribas

Hey, guys. Karl Ackerman from BNP Paribas. Thanks for the time today. How do you see the adoption of optical circuit switches across hyperscalers who already deploy third-party switches in routers? I guess would optical circuit switches be used in greenfield data center deployments at a certain insert, insertion point, such as 1.6T? How do I think about the adoption of that? Thank you.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Okay. Sunny, you want to take this?

Sunny Sun
President of Networking, Coherent

Yeah. We have been working on this at the, you know, key customers for making the key components for optical circuit switch for many—for quite a few years. It's seven or eight years ago. So actually, we have supplied large volumes of net OCS, optical circuit switch, components to the customers who make it their own optical circuit switch. So this deployment has been implemented in the certain AI machine learning clusters. So right now, just the more about broadly cover, and then now is at an adopt for more customers with their AI requirements. We could see this, that the implementations with increased the capacity, especially for AI network requirements, for this switch loading requirements. This will be broadly covered by more customers.

We have seen more engagements with that, the, additional hyperscale and AI network, operators.

Karl Ackerman
Managing Directors of Semiconductors and Networking Hardware, BNP Paribas

Okay.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

I could add, if it's okay, Sunny, is that, yeah, it's a significant network change, and so I think you'll see it mainly in greenfield. But as Sunny said, because of the papers that were published showing the dramatic cost savings and the dramatic power consumption savings, there's a lot of interest. Yeah, yeah.

Karl Ackerman
Managing Directors of Semiconductors and Networking Hardware, BNP Paribas

That's good.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Ananda?

Ananda Baruah
Sr Equity Analyst, Loop Capital

Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks. So Ananda Baruah, Loop Capital. Thanks for doing this. Question is, you had mentioned share as part of the presentation. Question is, as innovation cycles continue to compress, you know, Gen AI-related innovation cycles, do you, do you think that has any impact on share implications in transceivers, for folks who can innovate—who have the ability to innovate more quickly, and, and what might those share implications be? And I'd love to then also just, you know, to the extent you have an opinion on that, you know, how, what kind of conviction do you have in that opinion? Thanks.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Thanks. That's a very critical question for us. We've been thinking about that.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Yeah.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

W e do see this for AI, particularly the production introduction cycle, does compress relative to the traditional hyperscaler, you know, data center generational change. And, that actually plays into our strength in terms of our intimacy with the top kind of leaders on the AI cluster design and manufacturing. And, we have chance to use our cutting-edge technologies, right? You know, just to give you an example. Right now, everybody knows there is a 100G per channel VCSEL shortage, right? You know, since we have our own internal VCSELs and the transceiver team and the VCSEL team working together, you know, we can probably get more output than our competitors.

C ombining all that and also with our strong commitment with the next two generations of the product development, we think that we'll end up gaining more share in this AI race relative to previous hyperscaler, you know, general market.

Ananda Baruah
Sr Equity Analyst, Loop Capital

A follow-up to that is, if you look out, you know, three to five years, do you think that the share composition of, let's call them sweet spot, sweet spot bandwidth, speeds, looks meaningfully different in three to five years than it does today or it has historically?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

You want to take on that?

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

I think the one thing I can say is, as you alluded to, Ananda, it's hard. This stuff is hard, and it's very hard, and it's ramping very fast, and the generations are coming faster and faster, just as we're approaching, like, device physical limitations. So it's very hard. And so because of that, for instance, now at 800G, 1.6T, you see very few really strong competitors compared to, like, 10G or even 100G. And I think that should benefit us, and I don't see it slowing down. Yeah, yeah.

Ananda Baruah
Sr Equity Analyst, Loop Capital

Yeah, got it. That's, that's what I'm asking about. Thanks.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Thank you.

Speaker 14

Hey, guys, thank you. Just talking a little bit about the GTC announcements on the interconnect side, you know, now that you can load up the up to a 10K GPU cluster on a two-layer network. So, like, what do you guys see as the content impact for the transceivers for you guys? And, maybe do the ASPs increase with the higher bandwidth ports just make up for that? And also on your projections, does that have any impact? Thank you.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

For anybody asking a question, just for the benefit of those out on the web, if you could introduce yourself before the question, that'd be appreciated.

Speaker 14

Okay.

Sanjai Parthasarathi
CMO, Coherent

Yeah, I'll try that. T he generational change that was announced last week, you know, you're talking about from going from four optical ports of 800G capacity to 36 optical ports of 1.6 Tbps capacity. So 18-fold increase in terms of the opportunity for optical transceivers for a fully loaded system. So it is a big, you know, and in line with what we have been projecting. I mean, you saw there was a big inflection in 2023 of the market, and that inflection is all about AI.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Answer your question?

Speaker 14

Thank you.

Beck Mason
President of Telecommunications, Coherent

Questions on the line?

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

No. Anybody else?

Dave Kang
Sr Research Analyst of Technology Research, B. Riley

Yeah. Dave Kang, B. Riley. Just a follow-up question on 800 G ramp. So if you do the math, you said you're going to do about $450 million in second half. Even if you just go sideways, that's about $900 million next year. Just wondering how much of a further growth from the current half that we're in.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

We, you know, in terms of 800 shipment, we grow, you know, 10s of more than 10-fold this fiscal year versus last year. We're certainly not going to grow that much next year. But we still want to see at least current projections still see a healthy growth. And and once we reach that, that's. Yeah, that's going to be more than half, 800G alone is going to be more than half of our revenue or close to half of our revenue.

Papa Sylla
VP and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Hello, this is Papa Sylla from Citi. I have maybe a couple of questions. On the DSP front, on the telco, I know you started doing some work there. I guess, what's the target on being internal versus using merchant DSPs? A re the effort you are making on the telco transferable to Data com, or is that even the goal? And I have a follow-up.

Beck Mason
President of Telecommunications, Coherent

Okay, let me try the first part of that. So, obviously, DSPs are a very large investment. When you go and develop a three-nanometer DSP, just to put it in context, the mask set is about $25 million. So, it gives you an idea of the scope and scale of those developments. So, in our market, if we think about it, Telecom moves a little slower in the transceivers than in Datacom, and so we have 100 G, 400 G, and 800 G as the primary operating modes today. Even at 800 G, you know, the DSPs support multiple different rates. So, for example, our Silverton DSP will support 400 G.

For long reach, it'll support legacy 400G ZR modes, and it will support 800G high performance. So I think our goal is primarily over time, to migrate the bulk of our portfolio to internal designs. But where having partnerships with leading external suppliers helps us is, in some cases, we can't invest in every area to be first to market, or some markets are smaller or more niche or less proven. And so, in that case, those external partners are very helpful. On your second part of your question, from a technology perspective, I would say that the, you know, the front-end high-speed ADC DAC technology and the back-end SerDes technology on a Coherent DSP are very similar to what you use on a PAM4 DSP.

The internal functionality, though, is very, very different. T here is some synergy with that and some less so. But I think right now, we're not really commenting on any plans to vertically integrate around Datacom DSP technology.

Papa Sylla
VP and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Yeah. No, that's very helpful. A follow-up on the pricing, just general comment on pricing on 1.6T on the transceiver side. I guess there we heard a merchant, I guess, the leading merchant vendor kind of will probably raise prices almost at 2x, but obviously, you cannot go all the way to 2x because of, I guess, TCO. But I guess on the transceiver side, how much leverage do you have between the DSP vendor kind of almost being 2x and then kind of having a 2x limit on how much you're able to raise pricing on the overall device level? I don't know if the question makes sense.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

That's certainly a critical question for our profitability. I can't comment on detailed pricing. What I can comment is that traditionally, transceiver is indeed a very competitive market, right? And we make money on several occasions. You know, one is we're ramping up faster initially than other people. That when we can command a very healthy margin. The second is that we have very unique product or unique technologies that we can command a very healthy margin. For this 1.6T, just as Julie early on mentioned, it's pushing limit on multiple front, right? Electrical, optical, your own SerDes, your own transceiver design, and the thermal and optics.

We believe that with our technology breadth and depth, we'll be able to gain a healthy margin on that.

Papa Sylla
VP and Equity Research Analyst, Citi

Thank you.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Thanks.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Thanks, Papa.

Karan Juvekar
Equity Research Senior Associate, Morgan Stanley

Hi, Karan Juvekar from Morgan Stanley here. So clearly you're seeing a large revenue ramp on the second half for 800 G, going from $150-$450. I guess, how do you think this will differ on the 1.6T side? Do you think you see a similar sort of revenue step function, as you go into 1.6T? And then, given it's on 200 G per lane, do you think that impacts your production, or do you think you'll be able to sort of ramp your production on 1.6T, similar to the way you were able to on 800 G?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Yeah, well, yeah, we're confident that we're going to kind of perform better in terms of market share and gaining market share and profitability on 1.6T than 800G. But the exact, you know, time for commencing the shipment of a 1.6T is later as part of this year or early next year. It's still, you know, we're just as our competitor and our customers were feat- vehemently kind of fiercely working on it.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Just if I could add, Lee, that, you know, some amount of the. For instance, if you're making an EML at 100G or 200G, it's still an EML running through your fab. So a lot of the capacity that we have is fungible, kind of, to other data rates. The maybe singular exception is test equipment, right?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Right.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Test equipment is data rate specific.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Yeah, absolutely.

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Everything else is pretty much data rate unspecific. Yeah.

Karan Juvekar
Equity Research Senior Associate, Morgan Stanley

Thank you.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Lee, we received a question from the web, and I think I know the answer, but the question is: When you referenced 800G being half of a revenue after the strong 25% growth, what were you referring to? And I trust we're referring to, as we said back in the shareholder letter, that 800G this year, we think will be half of our-- or AI will be half of our total revenue for the year. But was there something else you were referring to on the 800G growth in and of itself?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

We're referring to just as what we referenced in our investor letters. Yeah. It's essentially with 800G further growth and with the AI there. We also ship a 400G for AI, and all that combined is half of our revenue for fiscal 2024.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Okay. Anybody else before we wind down?

Jeff Koche
Associate Analyst in Data Infrastructure, Raymond James

I have a question.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Please use the mic.

Jeff Koche
Associate Analyst in Data Infrastructure, Raymond James

Jeff Koche with Raymond James. In your updated Datacom transceiver opportunity by laser type, you just have EML at, like, 68% of the opportunity of the $15 billion. You updated that last quarter, and that was material increase. So seems like you're suggesting EMLs are gonna be the major beneficiary. I just want to know how that squares with, like, you know, the linear drive, you know, technologies and what your thoughts are there?

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Okay.

Jeff Koche
Associate Analyst in Data Infrastructure, Raymond James

'Cause I believe EMLs are not compatible with.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Okay.

Jeff Koche
Associate Analyst in Data Infrastructure, Raymond James

Linear drive. Thank you.

Sanjai Parthasarathi
CMO, Coherent

Yeah. Good, good question.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Thanks.

Sanjai Parthasarathi
CMO, Coherent

When we presented that in as part of our earnings call package in February, the assumption was that 200G EMLs will not make it into 1.6T. That was the assumption. That's why the EML piece went very large. But we know that this—you know that this week, two vendors, one including one of us being—one of them being us, have talked about a path to 200G EMLs. So this market keeps changing. The architecture is evolving, the laser types are changing, so we will be refreshing that.

I do anticipate that the VCSEL portion will grow larger than what it is currently, and the EMLs will shrink a little bit because as Julie often says: "If you're able to make a transceiver of the VCSEL, that will be the lowest cost, the lowest power consumption. You will do it that way. Everything else comes later.

Jeff Koche
Associate Analyst in Data Infrastructure, Raymond James

Any thoughts on linear?

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Wait, let me just repeat the question: Thoughts being a linear drive.

Lee Xu
EVP of Datacenter, Coherent

Julie, you want to take it?

Julie Sheridan Eng
CTO, Coherent

Yeah, for the linear drive, we do think there are customers that like that interface. It's generally where it's a book-ended application, where the customer owns both ends of the application because it is more of an engineered link. You get certain power savings and cost savings, but you pay a price to get that power savings and cost savings by having to really engineer the link. O ur estimate is more like, you know, a subset of the volume will be linear. And for that, you know, we are looking at the application of VCSELs for that, but also for us, for the long wave, we're looking at our DFB-MZ for that application. That's a very linear device. But I think it'll be, you know, a subset of the total pluggable market. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Silverstein
SVP of Investor Relations and Coporate Communications, Coherent

Anybody else? Going, going. All right, before we wrap up, I just wanna thank again the team, Julie, Sanjai, Beck, and Lee, and Sunny and Chuck. O n a personal note, I wanna thank them, on behalf of myself and the team, Chuck, for his exceptional leadership. You really... I've been here nine months, and I've just been blown away. And I really mean that. We look forward to continuing our discussion with many of you. For those of you who I know, it's always great to see you. For those of you I don't, please feel free to come up and introduce yourself. And for all of you, those of you who I've known, those of you who I meet, I'd be more than happy to try to be of more help in your investment process.

I truly mean that, and I wish you a great rest of the conference. Thank you, everybody.

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