OFC 2026 in Los Angeles marked a defining moment for the optical and high-speed interconnect industry — and for Semtech. Held March 17–19 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the show brought together the global optical communications ecosystem at a critical inflection point: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping how data centers are built and the race to scale is pushing interconnect technology to move faster than anyone predicted.
Semtech arrived at OFC 2026 with a compelling story across both copper and optical — and the live demonstrations to back it up. Four strategic themes defined our presence:
- Scale-out with optics. Linear and retimed optics is scaling out AI clusters today, with deployments actively underway across hyperscale data centers.
- Scale-up: copper extends, optics enters at larger domains. Copper remains the most practical scale-up interconnect for today’s cluster sizes, but as AI clusters expand, optics is entering scale-up alongside copper, not replacing it.
- AI-driven acceleration. The data rate upgrade cycle has compressed from five years to one or two, demanding faster innovation across the signal chain.
- Full-stack signal integrity leadership. Semtech's growing portfolio now spans active copper cables, linear drivers, transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs), and multi-vendor optical links from 1.6T to 3.2T.
The Defining Story of OFC 2026: Copper and Optics Together — The Scale-Up Reality
Scale-out with optics is happening now, while copper and optics are both part of the scale-up story — copper extending its ceiling for today’s AI cluster as data rate increases rapidly, with optics entering to offer more advantages for scale –up.
Today's AI data centers rely on copper for scale-up — the dense, short-reach XPU-to-XPU connections within a rack — and copper remains the most practical, broadly deployable interconnect for current cluster sizes. But as AI clusters expand to hundreds of thousands of XPUs and domain sizes grow, the picture becomes more nuanced: copper keeps extending its ceiling while optics enters alongside it for larger domains, not as a replacement but as a complement. The industry isn’t choosing one path; it’s building infrastructure that supports both.
"Scale-up with optics is the hot topic right now," said Weiliang Deng, Semtech's director of data center signal integrity product marketing. "The inflection is coming — and it's exciting for the entire industry. For the first time, we're seeing serious discussions about using optics for scale-up at volume, which means bigger deployments and better performance at increasing data rates and bandwidth."
Semtech at OFC 2026: Live Demonstrations Across the Signal Chain
1.6T Optical Interconnect: FiberEdge® in Action
Semtech’s booth featured live multi-vendor 1.6T optical interconnect demonstrations built on its FiberEdge TIA and Driver portfolio. A 224G/lane 102.4T Ethernet switch ran live traffic over both single-mode and multimode fiber using OSFP transceivers spanning fully retimed (FRO), linear retimed (LRO), and linear pluggable optics (LPO) architectures — all powered by Semtech’s GN1832, GN1834D, GN1834L, and GN1836 TIAs alongside GN1887 and GN1878 Modulator Drivers. A separate demonstration ran NVIDIA’s latest-generation 1.6T DR8 OSFP transceiver on a live NVIDIA test platform using the GN1834D TIA and GN187N1 Modulator Driver.
Applications: AI training cluster interconnects, cloud data center fabric, hyperscaler scale-up networks, high-performance computing (HPC)
1.6T Active Copper Cable: CopperEdge™ Powering Scale-Up Today
Semtech demonstrated 1.6T active copper cable (ACC) performance using its CopperEdge GN8234 Redriver IC, running live traffic to NVIDIA's 224G/lane SerDes. The demo illustrated how Semtech's signal conditioning silicon enables current-generation scale-up architectures to push active copper cable performance to the limits of what the physics allows — a testament to the continued and essential role of copper in AI infrastructure.
Applications: Scale-up XPU-to-XPU connections, server-to-switch links, intra-rack high-density AI cluster fabrics
3.2T Active Copper: A Glimpse at Next-Generation Scale-Up Capability
Semtech also previewed next-generation capability with a 3.2T active copper cable demonstration using the CopperEdge GN8304 Redriver at 448G per channel — the highest per-channel data rate shown at OFC 2026. This demonstration signals Semtech's readiness to support the next wave of AI infrastructure upgrades, well ahead of volume deployment timelines.
What AI Is Doing to the Industry's Upgrade Cycle
One of the most striking observations from OFC 2026 was not a product — it was pace.
Historically, the data center industry operated on roughly a five-year cycle for data rate upgrades. AI has collapsed that to one or two years, with 400G and 800G now in active deployment discussion while the industry simultaneously debates 1.6T and 3.2T architectures.
"What amazed me is how AI is driving the optical industry to move so fast," said Deng. "With co-packaged optics (CPO), near package optics (NPO) and eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO) different form factors all trying to enter the market — we never saw this kind of innovation velocity before. AI made it happen. It's enabling us to do things much faster, much quicker, and the data rate increases are just phenomenal."
This acceleration creates both pressure and opportunity for suppliers across the signal chain. Companies that can offer broad, manufacturable, cost-effective solutions across the full interconnect spectrum — copper and optical — are the ones positioned to win.
When the Dust Settles: Why Linear Optics Wins
With multiple competing optical architectures generating buzz at OFC 2026 — from CPO to NPO to various pluggable form factors — the natural question is: what actually gets deployed at scale?
Deng's answer is straightforward: Linear Optics.
"There's a wide range of solutions in the market right now. But when the dust settles, the industry will gravitate toward what is manufacturable, low cost and simple in design— and that is Linear Optics such as LPO or NPO," said Deng. "Linear Optics will be the architecture that sees real, large-scale deployment. That's what we're supporting and that's what we're building toward."
Semtech's DirectEdge™ portfolio is purpose-built for exactly this moment. At OFC, Semtech launched its new family of 224 Gbps per lane TIAs and MZM drivers — the GN1834L, GN1834DL, GN1838DL, GN1877, and GN1887 — designed specifically for LPO, LRO, XPO, NPO, and CPO applications at 800G, 1.6T, and 3.2T. These CEI-224G-Linear and LPO-MSA compliant devices deliver the performance and features required to maintain link integrity as data centers move beyond DSP-based architectures, while their low inherent latency supports faster AI feedback loops and inference cycles. The DirectEdge portfolio positions Semtech to capture LPO's volume ramp as deployments move from proof-of-concept to production scale — with an IC family engineered not just for today’s 800G deployments, but for the 1.6T and 3.2T architectures already taking shape.
OFC 2026 Wrap-Up: Semtech at the Center of AI Scale-Up and Scale-Out
OFC 2026 made one thing clear: the AI data center buildout is moving faster than anyone planned, and the interconnect decisions being made today will define infrastructure performance for years to come. Whether you're scaling out AI clusters with high-bandwidth optical links, extending copper for today's scale-up domains, or planning for the optical layer that enters as cluster sizes grow — Semtech has the signal integrity portfolio to support you across every layer of that journey. If you're working through your interconnect roadmap, our team is ready to help.
Explore Semtech's full portfolio of Signal Integrity solutions including FiberEdge and DirectEdge optical PMDs and CopperEdge redriver ICs designed for 224G and 448G applications. Contact our team to discuss your AI interconnect roadmap.
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