As an important active optical device, the optical module realizes the electrical-to-optical conversion and the optical-to-electrical conversion of the signal at the transmitting end and the receiving end respectively.
Since the transmission of communication signals mainly uses optical fibers as the medium, and the generator, forwarder, processing, and receiving ends process electrical signals, optical modules have a wide and growing market space.
What is the current situation of the specific optical module market and what is the prospect of the optical module market,
let’s take a closer look at the article!
1. What Is the Status of the Optical Module Market?
The global optical module industry chain has a clear division of labor. Europe, the United States, and Japan started earlier in technology, focusing on chip and product research and development.
China has obvious advantages in the middle reaches of the industry chain: labor costs, market size, and the support of telecom equipment manufacturers, after years of development, it has become a global optical module manufacturing base and has developed into a number of optical module brands with leading global market share.
The division of labor in the industrial chain effectively utilizes the advantageous global production factors. It avoids repeated research and development, which is conducive to the efficient operation of the global industrial chain, but it is difficult for China to share the huge upstream value.
Due to the transparent price of low-end products, many overseas companies cannot accept too low gross profit margins and then divest the optical module business to focus on chips or retain high-end products.
On the other hand, optical communication giants have also undergone a series of mergers and acquisitions to enhance vertical synergy with the entire industry chain, enhance scale advantages, and improve bargaining power.
2. What Is the Market Prospect of Optical Modules?
High speed is the inevitable trend in the future development of optical modules. With the evolution of optical modules to 40G optical modules, 100G optical modules, 400G optical modules, and even 800G optical modules, the optical fiber transmission speed of Tb/s may become the bottleneck of the optical communication transmission rate.
The ultra-high transmission rate of silicon photonics integration technology can break this bottleneck and achieve Pb/s-level transmission. At the same time, due to the low price of silicon materials and the mature application in semiconductor technology, it can greatly reduce the procurement cost of optical modules and the technical difficulty of integration, breaking through the cost constraints of traditional optical modules.
The communication industry belongs to the national strategic basic industry, which has been vigorously promoted and supported by the government and has maintained continuous growth in recent years.
5G is the main direction of the development of the new generation of mobile communication technology and an important part of the future generation of information infrastructure. Compared with 4G, 5G communication technology has faster speed, wider bandwidth, higher reliability, and lower latency.
It will become an important carrier to fill the digital gap and will open up new industries such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. door.
Based on the advantages of 5G communication technology, actively promoting 5G research and development, and industrial application, the future industry development prospects are broad and will drive the sustainable development of the optical module industry.