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 across the global industry chain. The event, held in parallel with the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), focused on the evolution of near-packaged optics (NPO) and the development of international standards. According to the source, experts from organizations including OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi participated in in-depth discussions on ecosystem upgrade and industry chain collaboration. A consensus on international NPO standards was reached, which the organizers say lays a solid foundation for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO.
The significance of this consensus lies in its potential to address growing energy and scalability challenges in data centers powering artificial intelligence. 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 that 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. In contrast, 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'.
Industry leaders underscored the commercial momentum behind NPO. Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted that 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, noting an urgent need to use opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome the challenges introduced by advanced packaging processes. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, stated that 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. Furthermore, with the introduction of key technologies like built-in light sources and highly-integrated SiPh chips, this NPO product features 'high bandwidth, high reliability, and high availability' while achieving 'low latency, low power consumption, and low cost'.
At the CIOE, the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, particularly those 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. The success of the summit and exposition marks a milestone for the development of the global NPO industry. A consensus was reached on international NPO standards and the paths for collaboration between standards organizations and the industry chain were streamlined, laying a solid foundation for the large-scale commercial use of NPO. Furthermore, the joint exhibition of industry ecosystem products has strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.
