How do you think the prospect of CPO--A hot topic at OFC 2026
This week, OFC 2026 is taking industial storms in Los Angeles. Almost as we expected, CPO solutions quickly became the hot topic at the event. How is it developed now, and how do you think the prospect of this technology? Let's take a glance.
In the last two years, the industry has made significant strides of CPO technologies. They are now far more reliable. Looking ahead to the 400G-per-lane SerDes generation, CPO may become the only viable option. At such speeds, even the best PCB traces or flyover cables may introduce too much insertion loss. That's when transitioning to optical signaling within the package itself becomes essential.
As momentum for CPO grew, vendors pursued key M&A deals to shore up their positions in the market segment over the past year. Marvell moved to acquire Celestial AI, a next-generation CPO vendor, for $3.25 billion, and later XConn to broaden its data center switching portfolio with PCIe. Leading companies like Broadcom, Intel, and IBM have heavily invested in CPO, developing production-ready platforms that integrate silicon photonics with advanced packaging techniques. At the component level, CPO and high-speed transceivers are accelerating their implementation in the optical component field. During the conference, Coherent, Lumentum, and Marvell collectively disclosed multiple new product advancements.
Compared to the old technology, CPO solution has the blow benefits:
CPO benefits
1. Power Efficiency: By minimizing the electrical path between optics and electronics, CPO reduces the need for high-power drivers, repeaters, and retimers, lowering energy consumption per bit.
2. High Bandwidth: Direct integration with ASICs enables higher data rates, supporting next-generation AI, HPC, and data-intensive applications.
3. Improved Performance: Signal integrity is enhanced, latency is reduced, and insertion loss is minimized, which is critical for high-speed data transfer.
4. Scalability: CPO allows data centers to connect multiple nodes at high bandwidths, supporting growing storage and processing demands.
5. Optimized System Design: Co-design of optical and electrical components improves reliability, and overall system efficiency.
However, as we analysize, the old technology is widely used, and it also has advantages in terms of cost and upstream and downstream productsthe road of CPO still have some hurdles ahead.
CPO Deployment Hurdles
Ecosystem Disruption: CPO fundamentally changes the supply chain. Instead of purchasing interchangeable pluggable modules from multiple vendors, customers have to source integrated CPO switches or servers from a single system vendor or a tightly coupled partnership. This reduces sourcing flexibility and increases vendor lock-in.
Operational Complexity: Field replacement and failure management become more complex. A failure in an optical engine might require replacing an entire CPO switch line card or server board rather than just swapping a pluggable module. Developing robust testing, diagnostics, and repair strategies for CPO systems at scale is a major undertaking.
Cost: At present, CPO does not have a significant cost advantage over high-volume pluggable optics. As the volumes pick up, this equation should change.
As a company of high-density cable assemblies and solutions, Shenzhen Optico are always pursuing the latest technology and dedicate to meet the harsh requirement of next generation cabling in telecommunication and data centres, especially in the AI era that requires high bandwidth and even faster computing capacity. We will closely follow the OFC2026 and cheer for all wonderful technologies.