On September 10, the NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, convened at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, bringing together global industry leaders to discuss the evolution of near-packaged optics (NPO) and the development of international standards. The summit concluded with a consensus on international NPO standards, marking a significant step toward industry upgrade and large-scale commercial deployment of NPO technology.
The event drew participation from top players across the global supply chain, including experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. Discussions focused on NPO evolution, ecosystem upgrade, and industry chain collaboration, ultimately laying a solid foundation for the commercial future of NPO.
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 critical 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." He called upon stakeholders to join hands in developing NPO standards and driving the ecosystem from "usable" to "easy-to-use at scale."
Industry leaders underscored the urgency and 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, announced 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."
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 featured 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 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 standards and streamlined collaboration paths between standards organizations and the industry chain lay a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of NPO. As the industry moves forward, these developments are expected to accelerate the adoption of NPO technology, addressing the growing demands of SuperPoD interconnects and driving the next generation of optical networking solutions.
