What is co-packaged optics (CPO)? Co-packaged optics (CPO) is the tight integration of optical and electrical components within the same package.
Co-packaged optics (CPO) is the tight integration of optical and electrical components– such as silicon photonics, optical engines, and ASICs—within the same SoC package to overcome the limitations of traditional copper interconnects and pluggable optics in high-bandwidth applications. CPO offers significant bandwidth density, compute performance and energy efficiency improvements for data center networks, enabling faster, more scalable connections for both scale-out and scale-up networks.
A variety of co-packaged optics solutions are being developed to address the demands of next-generation computing architectures. For instance, NVIDIA has announced CPO-based networking switches. The NVIDIA CPO switch technology is designed for AI scale-out architectures, enabling high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects across large clusters. In contrast, Ayar Labs offers co-packaged optics solutions tailored for AI scale-up architectures. Ayar Labs’ CPO technology offers the benefits of chip-to-chip optical connectivity within AI compute clusters.
Example of co-packaged optics: two TeraPHY™ optical engine chiplets (left) with a customer FPGA (center) within the same SoC package.