News: Optoelectronics
8 April 2025
Co-packaged optics accelerating towards commercialization
Engineered substrate manufacturer Soitec of Bernin, near Grenoble, France says that it welcomes recent industry steps to accelerate development and commercialization of co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions for data centers.
The rapidly rising data requirements of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) are driving demand for silicon photonics-based CPO architectures, which integrate optical connectivity directly into processor housings, increasing both bandwidth and energy-efficiency.
Recent industry initiatives to accelerate the commercialization of co-packaged optics include the unveiling of NVIDIA's first CPO products, Spectrum-X and Quantum-X, on 18 March. These innovations will be integrated into the next generation of NVIDIA servers designed for AI cloud infrastructure. These announcements follow the earlier introduction of CPO products and demonstrators by Broadcom, Intel, and Marvell.
Processor architectures are being overhauled as growing data demand pushes them to current limits and drives higher electricity consumption. For data centers, CPO adoption enables energy savings of around 30% compared with existing optical transceiver-based solutions.
CPO components are reliant on specialist silicon-on-insulator (photonics-SOI) substrates. With its two decades of experience in Photonics-SOI and industrial capacity to scale the technology, Soitec reckons that it is uniquely placed to support market demand while maintaining high performance and reliability.
“The coming shift to CPO-based data-center architectures is a major opportunity for Soitec’s advanced semiconductor materials, which already offer significant energy-efficiency and performance gains in applications ranging from mobile and wireless connectivity to electric cars,” says Soitec’s CEO Pierre Barnabé. “The latest industry initiatives and announcements show that momentum for widespread CPO adoption is building,” he adds. “This is further evidence that our strategic investments in innovation and technological diversification are paying off.”
Also, Soitec has joined the SEMI Silicon Photonics Industry Alliance (SEMI SiPhIA), a group of more than 100 semiconductor industry partners, with TSMC and ASE serving as advocates. The alliance's mission is to drive silicon photonics innovation and applications, advance industry standards, and foster knowledge-sharing, resource integration, and technical exchange. Through its membership, Soitec aims to contribute to strengthening supply chain partnerships and fostering international collaboration on the deployment of key next-generation technologies, including CPO.
