On September 10, the NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, convened at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, drawing participation from leading global technology firms including OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. The summit achieved a consensus on international standards for near-packaged optics (NPO), a development that could accelerate the industry's shift toward more energy-efficient and scalable optical interconnect solutions.
Dr. Zhao Wenyu, Vice Chairman of IPEC and Deputy Director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), outlined the pressing need for NPO standards. "As SuperPoDs continue to expand in scale, traditional optical modules are consuming huge amounts of energy, and co-packaged optics (CPO) faces constraints like a closed industry chain and complex operations and maintenance," he said. "In contrast, near-packaged optics (NPO) – with its excellent energy efficiency, a favorable trade-off in port density, and strong compatibility with existing pluggable ecosystems – is expected to become the preferred solution for SuperPoD interconnect in the near term, and coexist and evolve alongside CPO and other solutions in the long term." He called upon stakeholders across industry, academia, research institutions, and user groups to collaborate on developing NPO standards and driving the ecosystem from "usable" to "easy-to-use at scale."
Industry experts underscored the technical trajectory and challenges ahead. Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, noted that as SuperPoDs expand and GPU and switch chip SerDes data rates increase, optical interconnect solutions will advance more rapidly toward 6.4T NPO. He emphasized the urgent need for opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome challenges introduced by advanced packaging processes. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, highlighted his company's progress: "In exploring the optimal interconnect solution – NPO – for SuperPoDs, Huawei has launched the industry's first high-bandwidth 7.2T NPO product and successfully conducted a demonstration of dynamic transmission at the IPEC exhibition booth." He added that with technologies like built-in light sources and highly-integrated SiPh chips, the product achieves "high bandwidth, high reliability, and high availability" while delivering "low latency, low power consumption, and low cost."
Concurrently, at the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, particularly from the US, Japan, and China. The display featured high-density connector solutions from leading US and Japanese vendors, alongside NPO modules of various capacities developed by multiple Chinese vendors, as well as several NPO switches, demonstrating a high level of commercial maturity.
The success of the summit and exposition marks a milestone for the global NPO industry. The consensus on international standards and streamlined collaboration paths between standards organizations and the industry chain lay a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of NPO. The joint exhibition of ecosystem products has strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem. As reported by Media OutReach Newswire, this development signals a significant step toward more sustainable and efficient data center interconnects, with potential impact across the telecommunications and cloud computing sectors.
