1. What is CPO?
CPO, short for Co-packaging optics, is called co-packaging optics in Chinese, which is a packaging technology in which the optical engine PIC and the electrical engine EIC are sealed together. The optical engine includes active optical devices and passive optical devices, and the electrical engine includes various electrical chips and circuit parts. Co-packaged optics has the following advantages:
Reduce power consumption. reduce costs. Reduce size
2. Current COBO packaging method: move the optical module from the front panel to the inside of the switch, on the same substrate as the switch, and the circuit length becomes shorter; co-packaged optical method: move the optical engine in the optical module to the switch chip On the same Interposer substrate, the circuit length is further shortened. For co-packaged optical methods, there is also an evolution path from 2.5D packaging of external light sources/built-in light sources to the final realization of 3D packaging.
3. What is a CPO encapsulated switch? The optical engine of multiple optical modules and the switch ASIC chip are on the same substrate, which greatly shortens the distance of electrical signal transmission between the switch and the optical module, which not only reduces the requirements of the Serdes chip, but also reduces the transmission power of electrical signals. At the same time, the requirements for the DSP chip originally required in the optical module are also lower, so as to achieve the purpose of reducing the overall system power consumption of the optical module and the switch. The switch ASIC chip includes core chips such as CPU and memory controller, and I/O modules based on Serdes chips. The light engine can be a silicon light engine or a light engine composed of traditional discrete components, which mainly include active optical devices such as lasers and photodetectors, wavelength division multiplexing/demultiplexing, and optical connectors. Source optical devices, as well as electronic chips such as driver, TIA, and power control.
4. The 51.2T/s switch era is an excellent opportunity for CPO to enter the market.
The CPO market has broad prospects, and the data center is its main battlefield. CPO can be widely used in various fields, including data centers, high-speed industrial interconnections, and high-performance computing. Because of its low cost, low power consumption and small size, it is gradually being accepted by the entire industry. According to the CIR report, the market size of CPO in 2026 will reach 344 million U.S. dollars, and by 2030 it will rapidly grow to 2.3 billion U.S. dollars. Among them, 63% will come from cloud service provider data center business. The data center is the main battlefield of CPO. If the switch is to reach a rate of 51.2Tbps and above, CPO is far superior to the traditional pluggable solution and the COBO solution in terms of cost-effectiveness and solution feasibility. At the same time, major equipment vendors and cloud service giants are actively developing to promote the rapid development of CPO switches.
5. The participation of large manufacturers with multiple backgrounds in the CPO market will further accelerate the development of CPO. From the perspective of the industry, CPO will be one of the best solutions in the future to solve the thermal and power consumption problems of high-speed optoelectronics. In recent years, manufacturers with different backgrounds have gradually joined the CPO market. Cloud service vendors Facebook and Microsoft created the CPO alliance, aiming to build a platform to attract industry leaders to join the alliance and promote the establishment of CPO standards and product development; equipment vendors Cisco and Juniper will both launch 51.2T/s in the future CPO switches; chip manufacturers Intel and Broadcom have developed CPO switches based on their respective switch chips. Domestic manufacturers are also deploying in this field. Among them, Hengtong Optoelectronics and Rockley of the United Kingdom have launched a 3.2T CPO switch prototype. Manufacturers such as Zhongji Innolux and Xinyisheng are also deploying in this field.
