The NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, concluded on September 10 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center with a landmark consensus on international standards for near-packaged optics (NPO). The agreement, reached by top players from across the global industry chain, lays a solid foundation for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO, a technology poised to become the preferred solution for SuperPoD interconnect in the near term.
The summit drew experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi, among others. Discussions focused on NPO evolution, international standards development, ecosystem upgrade, and industry chain collaboration. The consensus on international NPO standards is expected to accelerate the technology's path from 'usable' to 'easy-to-use at scale,' 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).
Dr. Zhao 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, 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 forward.
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. 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 that 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. With key technologies like built-in light sources and highly-integrated SiPh 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 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 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 consensus on international NPO standards and streamlined collaboration paths between standards organizations and the industry chain are expected to accelerate large-scale commercial use of NPO, which could significantly impact data center energy efficiency and interconnect scalability as SuperPoD deployments grow worldwide. For more information on IPEC, visit https://www.ipec.org.
