Global NPO Standards Consensus Reached at Shenzhen Summit

The NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, convened on September 10 at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center, bringing together top players from the global industry chain including experts from OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. The summit focused on NPO evolution and international standards development, with in-depth discussions on ecosystem upgrade and industry chain collaboration. A consensus on international NPO standards was reached, laying a solid foundation for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO. This achievement was reported by Media OutReach Newswire.

Dr. Zhao Wenyu, Vice Chairman of IPEC and Deputy Director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute of CAICT, emphasized that as SuperPoDs expand, traditional optical modules consume huge amounts of energy, and co-packaged optics (CPO) faces constraints like a closed industry chain and complex operations and maintenance. In contrast, near-packaged optics (NPO) offers excellent energy efficiency, a favorable trade-off in port density, and strong compatibility with existing pluggable ecosystems, making it the preferred solution for SuperPoD interconnect in the near term. He called upon stakeholders to join hands in developing NPO standards and driving the NPO ecosystem from 'usable' to 'easy-to-use at scale'. Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted the need for opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome advanced packaging challenges as optical interconnect advances towards 6.4T NPO. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of the Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory at Huawei, announced the industry's first high-bandwidth 7.2T NPO product, featuring high bandwidth, reliability, and availability with low latency, power consumption, and 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 US and Japanese vendors, NPO modules of various capacities from multiple Chinese vendors, and several NPO switches, demonstrating high commercial maturity. The success of the summit and exposition marks a milestone for the global NPO industry, streamlining collaboration paths between standards organizations and the industry chain, and strengthening industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.