Silicon Photonics & CPO Supply Chain

From Engineered Substrates to Hyperscale Data Centers — May 2026

Substrate
Epi-Wafer Foundry
SiPh PIC Foundry
Optical Component
CPO Engine / Transceiver
System Integrator
End User
█ Thick border = Market leader
Tier 1
Engineered Substrates
SOI & Engineered Wafers
Soitec (France)
Smart Cut SOI — industry standard for SiPh PICs
Shin-Etsu (Japan)
Bulk SOI & Si substrates
Siltronic (Germany)
SOI & polished wafers
Wafer Works (Taiwan)
Polished Si & epi-ready wafers
→
Tier 2
Epi-Wafer Foundry
(THE BOTTLENECK)
InP / GaAs Epi-Wafer (MOCVD)
IQE plc (UK/Taiwan)
Largest portfolio: GaAs, InP, GaN, GaSb. Broad customer base across RF + photonics
Landmark Optoelectronics (Taiwan)
Pure-play photonics epi. 70%+ YoY growth. Key supplier to Taiwan SiPh ecosystem
IntelliEPI (Taiwan)
MBE specialist, precise layer control
VPEC / Visual Photonics (Taiwan)
GaAs for RF + photonics
Alternative: SiPh PIC Foundries
TSMC (Taiwan)
CoWoS with CPO integration, 2026 volume
GlobalFoundries (US)
GF Fotonix — monolithic SiPh platform
Tower Semiconductor (Israel)
CPO foundry on SiPho process
→
Tier 3
Optical Components
Lasers, Modulators, Photodetectors
Lumentum (US)
DFB/EML lasers for 800G/1.6T. #1 in shipped lasers
Coherent / II-VI (US)
DFB/EML lasers, modulators. #2, strong in SiPh integration
Sivers Semiconductors (Sweden)
InP DFB laser arrays for AI. SiPh integration specialist. Fabless design house
WIN Semiconductors (Taiwan)
GaAs/InP pure-play foundry. RF-heavy, expanding photonics
Mitsubishi Electric (Japan)
InP lasers, high-reliability
→
Tier 4
CPO Engines & Transceivers
CPO Switch Engines & Pluggable Modules
Broadcom (US)
Tomahawk 5 / Thor CPO switch. Market leader in CPO engines
Marvell (US)
Teralynx CPO switch platform. Direct NVIDIA competition
NVIDIA (US)
Spectrum-X / Quantum-X with CPO. TSMC CoWoS integration
Cisco (US)
Silicon One with CPO roadmap
Eoptolink (China)
800G/1.6T transceiver modules
Source Photonics (China/US)
Optical modules, InP fab in-house
Accelink (China)
Transceivers, photonic integration
→
Tier 5
Systems & End Users
GPU & Switch Platforms
NVIDIA (US)
GB300 / Rubin platform, NVLink + CPO
AMD (US)
MI400 platform, UALink
Intel (US)
Gaudi / Falcon Shores (cancelled). SiPh IP remains
Arista (US)
Campus + DC switching, CPO adoption path
Hyperscale Cloud
Google / Alphabet
TPU v6, optical circuit switches
Microsoft / Azure
Maia AI accelerators
Amazon / AWS
Trainium / Inferentia
Meta
MTIA, open compute networking
FLOW: Soitec SOI wafers → SiPh PIC foundries (TSMC/GF/Tower) → CPO engines / transceivers → hyperscalers
LANDMARK & IQE InP epi-wafers → Lumentum & Coherent lasers → transceiver modules → CPO integration
The epi-wafer tier is the hard bottleneck — atomically perfect InP layers are the gating factor for 1.6T and beyond