The NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, concluded on September 10 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center with a consensus on international standards for near-packaged optics (NPO). The agreement, backed by global industry leaders including OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi, is set to accelerate the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO, a key interconnect technology for SuperPoDs (super compute clusters).
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. 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: "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 to evolve from 'usable' to 'easy-to-use at scale.'
The consensus on international standards is crucial because it lays a solid foundation for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO. Without standardized interfaces and specifications, vendors face interoperability challenges that slow adoption and increase costs. By aligning on standards, the industry can accelerate product development, reduce fragmentation, and ensure that NPO solutions from different vendors can work together seamlessly. This is particularly important as data centers and high-performance computing systems demand ever-higher bandwidth and energy efficiency.
Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted: "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 an urgent need to use opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome challenges introduced by advanced packaging processes. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, stated: "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 silicon photonics chips, the product features high bandwidth, high reliability, and high availability while achieving 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, particularly from the US, Japan, and China. The display included high-density connector solutions from leading vendors and NPO modules of various capacities from multiple Chinese vendors, alongside several NPO switches, demonstrating a high level of commercial maturity. This joint exhibition strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.
The success of the summit and exposition marks a milestone for the global NPO industry. The streamlined collaboration between standards organizations and the industry chain is expected to drive the large-scale commercial use of NPO, which will be essential for meeting the escalating bandwidth and energy efficiency demands of next-generation data centers and SuperPoDs. For more information, visit IPEC and OIF.
