CIOE Watch: The 'Big Four' Optical Fiber Players Take Center Stage

C114 News, September 10 (Liu Dingzhou) — Optical fiber has become core infrastructure for AI computing power. This year, driven by demand for AI computing power (and fiber-optic drones), the optical fiber market has surged, and related listed companies have become hot picks for capital market attention and investment.

In Hall 11 of the 27th China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), which opened yesterday, C114 noted a strong collective presence of fiber manufacturers, including the "Big Four" — YOFC, Hengtong Optic-Electric, FiberHome Technologies and Zhongtian Technology — as well as key players such as Tongding Interconnection Information and SDGI Information, and US-based Corning, which recently landed a multibillion-dollar Verizon fiber supply agreement. With the arrival of the AI era, fiber manufacturers have entered a new cycle of industry development and taken center stage at CIOE and in the optical interconnect industry.

So what eye-catching and impressive products and solutions did the fiber "Big Four" showcase?

Polarization-Maintaining Fiber Takes Center Stage

As a specialty fiber, polarization-maintaining fiber spent years in obscurity before leaping to prominence this year as one of the hottest products in the optical fiber field. The reason: as optical transmission speeds in data centers keep rising, fiber polarization stability has become a pressing issue. Thanks to its special waveguide structure and ability to transmit light with a stable state of polarization, polarization-maintaining fiber has become a key product for building optical interconnect solutions and a typical example of AI compute optical fiber.

At the booth, YOFC presented paired fiber solutions — polarization-maintaining fiber and single-mode fiber from the Prime series, developed specifically as matched pairs for CPO/NPO optical engine FAUs. The polarization-maintaining and single-mode fibers deliver upgraded mode-field matching and significantly improved long-term reliability. YOFC said it is the first company in China to mass-produce polarization-maintaining fiber products.

Hengtong Optic-Electric said its in-house developed PM fiber for CPO/NPO delivers exceptional performance, with crosstalk ≤-30 dB over 100 m and a beat length ≤4.0 mm, ensuring highly stable light source transmission and filling the domestic industrialization gap in high-end CPO PM fiber.

ZTT has designated PM fiber as a "Fiber Star" product at its booth, offering crosstalk ≤-30 dB over 100 m at 1310 nm. With precise geometric dimensions, stable polishing and excellent polarization-maintaining performance, it can efficiently couple with a wide range of optical components and meet the stringent requirements of CPO optical engine interconnection.

Notably, Hengtong Optic-Electric and YOFC are each holding new product launch events during the exhibition today. Hengtong Optic-Electric will unveil new CPO/NPO specialty fiber products and the PMFSen™ brand, while YOFC will launch specialty fiber for CPO/NPO and the CopackAlign™ brand. The importance both manufacturers place on PM fiber is clear.

Hollow-core fiber remains a hot topic

Over the past two years, hollow-core fiber has drawn close attention from the industry as a "next-generation optical fiber," thanks to its unique advantages of low latency, wide spectrum, low loss and low nonlinearity. Players in China and abroad are stepping up their efforts, moving toward live-network trials and commercial deployment. During the exhibition, the four fiber giants all highlighted hollow-core fiber and other cutting-edge fiber products.

Among them, FiberHome Telecommunication's booth stood out most prominently, with the debut of "Multi-Scenario Deployment Practices and Engineering Solutions for Hollow-Core Fiber," laying a solid practical foundation for the large-scale commercialization of hollow-core fiber. For cross-data center interconnect (DCI) scenarios, FiberHome Telecommunication deeply integrated hollow-core fiber with high-speed transmission systems, independently developed a new generation of 800G Scale-Across equipment, and completed an on-site live demonstration and validation of an integrated transmission solution at the exhibition.

Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable (YOFC) emphasized that its anti-resonant hollow-core fiber achieves an attenuation as low as 0.04 dB/km, a continuous length of more than 91 km per fiber, and world-leading commercial delivery volumes (over 10,000 fiber-km cumulatively). On site, it jointly demonstrated a hollow-core fiber testing solution with EXFO, drawing considerable attention from the industry.

Hengtong Optic-Electric said its hollow-core anti-resonant fiber relies on the disruptive principle of transmitting optical signals through air, reducing latency by 33% compared with conventional solid-core fiber. The product's attenuation has now broken through 0.036 dB/km, reaching an internationally advanced level, and the full-chain manufacturing process has been established, enabling large-scale batch delivery.

Zhongtian Technology (ZTT) showcased a range of products, including hollow-core fiber, heavily fluorine-doped tubes/rods, high-bandwidth multimode fiber, bend-insensitive single-mode fiber, ultra-low-loss large-effective-area fiber, 17,280-fiber spider-web optical cables and assemblies, and optical modules, supporting diverse needs such as high-speed data center interconnection, ultra-high-density cabling, and ultra-long-haul transmission over computing backbone networks.

Eye-catching "giants" too

Beyond innovative fiber products, the "Big Four" also showcased large-scale products and solutions highlighting their respective strengths.

Among the highlights, Hengtong Optic-Electric presented a high-density optical interconnect solution for intelligent computing campuses, offering high bandwidth, low latency, high density and efficient deployment to fully meet the growing interconnect demands of AIDC computing capacity.

Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable (YOFC) presented its "all-optical intelligent vehicle" solution, with a distinctly futuristic feel. The solution covers core scenarios including in-vehicle fiber optic lighting, in-vehicle optical communications, and laserradaramplifiers, providing high-bandwidth, highly reliable, low-latency optical transmission for intelligent driving.

ZTT Group's computing power center solution integrates three major systems — optoelectronic intelligent connectivity, green energy intelligent distribution, and unified wind-liquid cooling — to build efficient, green computing infrastructure. The solution offers interconnect products such as 224G high-speed copper cables, 800G optical modules, and ultra-high-fiber-count cables, as well as micro-modules and containerized data centers. A 40-foot containerized data center delivers more than 800 kW of total power per module and can be deployed and operational in as little as 1-2 days.

FiberHome's Fit MPO all-optical connectivity solution uses VSFF/MT high-density connectivity components and integrates a full stack of in-house developed products, including low-loss MPO, advanced shuffle cabling, 6912-fiber high-density subracks, and micro connectors. Its extreme space compression boosts cabling density, targeting the future of AI computing optical interconnects and enabling a technological leap from traditional single-fiber connections to ultra-high-density connectivity.

This year's CIOE show made clear that the value of optical fiber and fiber manufacturers is being reshaped in the AI era. Demand for AI computing power continues to grow, driving constant innovation in fiber technology and broadening application scenarios, creating entirely new industrial value. The "big four" of optical fiber, along with vendors such as Tongding Interconnection Information and SDGI, are stepping up technological innovation and embracing the AI era, opening up new room for performance growth.