BasaBasi

Outsourced Manufacturing Will Have Little Impact on Optical Suppliers' Operating Margins

Established technologies at lower bit-rates may be sourced from China or other lower cost regions but anything above 2.5Gb/s particularly for use in Single Mode applications is not straightforward to build with acceptable yield & performance. This applies more to the laser die themselves but complete transceivers are not trivial to assemble or test either.

I worked on the first 10Gb/s serial transceiver in the late 90s and remember the pain... though we were the industry leader in the end. Until the dot.com bubble burst of course!

All this gets me thinking about AMD and whether their decision to outsource is a terrible strategic error that means they will not have any degree of technology leadership in the coming years.