The NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, concluded with a consensus on international NPO standards, marking a pivotal step toward the large-scale commercial deployment of near-packaged optics (NPO). The event, held on September 10 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, gathered top players from the global industry chain, including experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. The agreement on standards is expected to accelerate industry upgrade and foster a robust international standards ecosystem.
The importance of this consensus lies in its potential to address critical challenges in high-performance computing and data center interconnects. As SuperPoDs continue to expand, traditional optical modules are consuming huge amounts of energy, and co-packaged optics (CPO) faces constraints such as a closed industry chain and complex operations and maintenance. According to 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), NPO offers excellent energy efficiency, a favorable trade-off in port density, and strong compatibility with existing pluggable ecosystems. He emphasized that NPO is expected to become the preferred solution for SuperPoD interconnect in the near term and coexist with CPO in the long term. Dr. Zhao 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'.
Industry leaders underscored the technical momentum behind NPO. Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted that as SuperPoDs expand and SerDes data rates increase, optical interconnect solutions will advance more rapidly towards 6.4T NPO, necessitating opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome advanced packaging challenges. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, revealed that Huawei has launched the industry's first high-bandwidth 7.2T NPO product and successfully demonstrated dynamic transmission at the IPEC exhibition booth. He noted 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'.
The summit's impact was further amplified by a joint exhibition at the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), where the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, particularly from the US, Japan, and China. The display included high-density connector solutions from leading vendors in the US and Japan, as well as NPO modules of various capacities developed by multiple Chinese vendors, alongside several NPO switches, demonstrating a high level of commercial maturity. This exhibition reinforced industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem. The consensus on international standards and streamlined collaboration paths between standards organizations and the industry chain lay a solid foundation for the large-scale commercial use of NPO. More information about IPEC can be found at https://www.ipec.org, and details about OIF are available at https://www.oiforum.com.
