Optics-heavy Monday. MaxLinear’s “Washington” kicks off a planned 1.6T TIA roadmap. GlobalFoundries planted a flag with SCALE, the first OCI MSA-capable co-packaged optics platform. And Alex Katouzian’s “new chapter” is Intel, where Lip-Bu Tan handed him a the Client Computing & Physical AI group. In the same release, Pushkar Ranade gets the full-time CTO job.
Plus Cerebras finally pulls the IPO trigger, Anthropic ARR keeps making numbers stop being real ($44B), and South Korea’s KOSPI is having a memory-fueled moment.
Let’s get into it.
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Maxlinear 1.6T Optical TIA for Datacenters
Maxlinear MXL 0.00%↑ announced a 4-lane 200G/lane transimpedance amplifier (TIA) for 1.6T optical modules called Washington. These Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) chips amplify the detected light after the photodetector in an optical transceiver, and are critical components on the receive side. Washington is the first of many low noise TIAs planned for fully-retimed, half-retimed, and linear optics.
The company is aiming for mass production in the second half of 2026, aligning with the expected ramp of higher-speed optical links. This launch coincides with the company raising its sales targets, citing momentum in its optical business driven by AI-related demand.
Vik: MXL is an interesting play that has seen +300% rise in stock price in the last month after Q1 ‘26 earnings (rev +43% YoY) with strong Q2 guidance. Their primary expertise is RF, analog, and mixed-signal chips but these recent optical TIAs are MXL’s AI optics infra play and the sentiment is red-hot bullish as is with everything in the world of optics these days.MXL is small optics player ($7B market cap) versus the MRVL and AVGO big-dogs.
Austin: The optics supplier list just keeps getting longer. So many companies to track 😅
GlobalFoundries goes after CPO with SCALE
GF launched its SCALE platform (Silicon photonics Co-packaged Advanced Light Engine) and is calling it the industry’s first OCI MSA–capable CPO platform. Built on GF’s silicon photonics process, SCALE supports CWDM and DWDM (with 8λ and 16λ bi-directional demonstrated natively), 50Gbps and 100Gbps micro-ring modulators, coupled ring resonators, integrated photodiodes, TSVs for power and high-speed signaling, and Cu pad pitches down to sub-45μm for 2.5D/3D stacking. The platform also lets customers pair best-in-class compute on advanced nodes with state-of-the-art optics in the same package.
The Optical Compute Interconnect MSA is the open optical scale-up spec the industry has been trying to coalesce around, with founding members including Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft.
Vik: Detachable broadband fiber attach is a nice serviceability story, and known-good-die testability is a legit CPO pain point. Their competition is on two fronts:
Tower is by far the majority supplier of 1.6T silicon PICs today, shipping into NVIDIA’s module ecosystem with most of a 5x SiPho expansion already prepaid through 2028.
TSMC’s COUPE is vertically integrated: their PIC, their EIC, their CoWoS, and is increasingly popular with CPO players like Nvidia, Broadcom and Ayar Labs.
GF’s pitch is the “open” foundry; MSA-aligned photonics with external foundry advanced-node compute on top. Is that compelling against incumbent Tower and TSMC’s vertical integration?
Austin: Sometimes I think “open” isn’t super compelling... until customers get squeezed on price increases or can’t get wafers. And then an open alternative is suddenly compelling. Fortunately for GF, that’s probably coming given the incoming scale-out and scale-up optics wave.
Katouzian’s “new chapter” is Intel + Ranade gets the CTO job
Yesterday on LinkedIn we saw Alex Katouzian leaving Qualcomm to start a new chapter. Today, Intel announced Katouzian as executive vice president and general manager of a brand-new Client Computing and Physical AI Group, reporting directly to Lip-Bu Tan.
In the same release, Pushkar Ranade has been appointed full-time CTO (off the interim tag), with quantum computing, neuromorphic, photonics, and novel materials in his charter. He’ll continue as chief of staff to the CEO.
Austin: Lip-Bu is a great talent recruiter, clearly having increased Intel’s talent density in his first 13 months or so at Intel.
I’m also happy for Pushkar Ranade being promoted to CTO. I enjoy his posts on X and Substack.
Quick Hits
Cerebras IPO is certainly much awaited especially after they withdrew its plans in October last year. They are seemingly targeting a valuation of $40B, while trying to raise $4B. Marketing starts today. Substack reports on this from Irrational Analysis and Tech Fund Investments.
Anthropic to buy DRAM-less AI “crisps” from a UK startup called Fractile, which is essentially building an SRAM-based accelerator for low latency inference. Commercial readiness only in 2027.
South Korea’s KOSPI index smashed through fresh all-time highs fueled by the memory boom led by Samsung and SK Hynix. The KOSPI is now up roughly 57% year-to-date — its second-best April on record.
