On September 10, the NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, convened at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, bringing together top players from the global industry chain to discuss the evolution and standardization of near-packaged optics (NPO). The summit concluded with a consensus on international NPO standards, a critical step toward industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO technology.
The event drew participation from experts representing OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi, among others. Discussions centered on NPO evolution, international standards development, ecosystem upgrade, and industry chain collaboration.
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), emphasized 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 join hands in developing NPO standards and driving the NPO ecosystem from "usable" to "easy-to-use at scale."
Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted the rapid advancement of optical interconnect solutions: "As SuperPoDs expand in scale and GPUs and switch chips increase their SerDes data rates, optical interconnect solutions will advance more rapidly towards 6.4T NPO." He noted 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, shared the 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 key 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."
At the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, including high-density connector solutions from leading US and Japanese vendors, NPO modules of various capacities from multiple Chinese vendors, and several NPO switches, demonstrating high commercial maturity.
The summit's success marks a milestone for the global NPO industry. The consensus on international standards and streamlined collaboration paths lay a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of NPO, while the joint exhibition of ecosystem products has bolstered industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem. For businesses and consumers, this progress promises more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable optical interconnect solutions, potentially accelerating advancements in data centers, AI, and high-performance computing.
