In a significant step for optical networking, 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, reached by top industry players including OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi, lays the groundwork for industry upgrade and large-scale commercial deployment of NPO technology.
NPO is emerging as a critical solution for the next generation of data center interconnects, particularly for SuperPoDs—massive computing clusters powering AI and high-performance workloads. As these systems expand, traditional optical modules consume excessive energy, while co-packaged optics (CPO) face challenges 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 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, coexisting with CPO in the long run, and called for collaborative standards development to evolve the NPO 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, noted that as SuperPoDs scale and SerDes data rates increase, optical interconnect solutions will advance more rapidly towards 6.4T NPO, requiring 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 demonstrated dynamic transmission at the IPEC exhibition booth. With built-in light sources and highly integrated silicon photonics chips, the product achieves high bandwidth, reliability, and availability while maintaining low latency, power consumption, and cost.
The summit coincided with the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), where the IPEC booth showcased the latest NPO industry chain achievements from the US, Japan, and China. The display included high-density connector solutions from leading US and Japanese vendors, as well as NPO modules of various capacities and several NPO switches from Chinese vendors, demonstrating high commercial maturity. The joint exhibition strengthened 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 mark a milestone for the global NPO industry, laying a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use. As data centers worldwide grapple with energy and performance demands, the agreement could accelerate the adoption of NPO, potentially reducing costs and power consumption while enabling higher bandwidth for AI and cloud applications.
