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 NPO standards. 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 near-packaged optics (NPO). The summit brought together experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi to discuss NPO evolution, international standards development, ecosystem upgrade, and industry chain collaboration.
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 urgency of the initiative. "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, and coexist and evolve alongside CPO and other solutions in the long term." Dr. Zhao 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 implications of this consensus are significant. With the relentless growth of SuperPoDs, energy consumption and operational complexity have become critical bottlenecks. The agreement on international NPO standards promises to accelerate the development of an open, interoperable ecosystem, reducing fragmentation and enabling economies of scale. This is expected to lower costs, improve reliability, and speed up deployment of high-speed optical interconnects in data centers and high-performance computing.
Industry leaders underscored the technical momentum. 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 the urgent need for opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome challenges from 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 built-in light sources and highly-integrated SiPh chips, the product achieves high bandwidth, reliability, and 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. The joint exhibition, which included connectors, NPO modules, and switches from vendors across China, the US, and Japan, 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 provide a clear framework for future development. This is expected to accelerate innovation, reduce barriers to entry, and foster a competitive yet cooperative environment. As NPO moves from 'usable' to 'easy-to-use at scale', it is poised to become a cornerstone of next-generation data center and computing infrastructure, driving the industry toward a more energy-efficient and scalable future.
