On September 10, the NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, concluded at the Shenzhen World Exhibition \u0026 Convention Center with a consensus on international standards for near-packaged optics (NPO). The agreement, backed by major industry players from China, the United States, and Japan, is intended to accelerate the commercial adoption of NPO technology and build a robust global standards ecosystem.

The summit brought together experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. Discussions centered on NPO evolution, ecosystem upgrades, and supply chain collaboration. Participants said the consensus is expected to lay a solid foundation for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO, a technology viewed as critical for next-generation data center interconnects.

Dr. Zhao Wenyu, Vice Chairman of IPEC and Deputy Director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), underscored the urgency of NPO development. “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 on stakeholders across industry, academia, and research institutions to collaborate on NPO standards and drive the ecosystem from “usable” to “easy-to-use at scale.”

Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted the rapid advance toward higher data rates. “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 said, emphasizing the need for opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome advanced packaging challenges.

Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, announced a major milestone: “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.” The product, he added, features “high bandwidth, high reliability, and high availability” while achieving “low latency, low power consumption, and low cost.”

At the concurrently held China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, including high-density connector solutions from U.S. and Japanese vendors, NPO modules of various capacities from Chinese vendors, and several NPO switches. The joint exhibition demonstrated a high level of commercial maturity and strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.

With international standards aligned and collaboration between standards organizations and the supply chain streamlined, the summit and exposition marked a milestone for the global NPO industry, laying a solid foundation for the large-scale commercial deployment of the technology.