Former Senior Post Silicon Validation Engineer at

Former Senior Post Silicon Validation Engineer at NVIDIA on CPO:

"Eventually, CPO is where the technology is converging and going to converge. Whoever comes with a reliable CPO product first, they will see a huge demand. There is absolutely no doubt about that. All these NPO and LPO are temporary compromise, for the lack of a better word."

Current State & Commercial Timeline

> Experimental Phase: CPO technology is currently in pilot and experimental stages, with no commercial products available yet.

> Timeline for Adoption: Initial CPO products are tentatively expected around 2028, though unexpected delays could occur due to major, unresolved engineering hurdles.

> Demand Dynamics: Once CPO is successfully and reliably commercialized, demand will experience an explosive surge, limited only by production supply rather than market interest.

Key Technical Hurdles

> Thermal Management: Compute chips generate kilowatts of heat, whereas optical engines are exceptionally sensitive to temperature changes (even minor shifts can alter laser wavelengths).

> Glass Substrates & Via Drilling: Transitioning from traditional organic substrates to glass is necessary for scale, but drilling microscopic, precise vias into glass without causing micro-cracking remains a massive challenge.

> Laser Integration: Internal laser setups face severe thermal interference from compute chips, while external laser setups struggle with high optical loss when trying to focus light onto extremely thin substrate layers.

Competitive & Technological Landscape

> Interim Solutions: Technologies like NPO (Near-Packaged Optics) and LPO (Linear Drive Pluggable Optics) are viewed as temporary compromises; once CPO matures, the industry will fully converge on it, causing demand for traditional pluggables to decline.

> Key Players: Major industry stakeholders—including TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and Amkor—are heavily investing in packaging R&D, with TSMC viewed as a dominant pioneer via solutions like CoWoS and CoPoS.

> Laser & Component Suppliers: Lumentum is positioned well ahead of competitors in the optical landscape, supported by strategic partnerships and investments (such as NVIDIA's capital backing).

Bill of Materials (BOM) Breakdown

> Packaging: Forms the largest share of the CPO BOM (~50% to 55%) and represents the hardest problem to commoditize.

> Light Sources / Lasers: Accounts for roughly one-third of the BOM.

> Cooling Solutions: Makes up the remaining portion, playing an equally vital role due to severe thermal constraints.

Optical Circuit Switching (OCS)

> Role in Future Infrastructure: Once signals are converted to light via CPO, OCS will become critical to route traffic dynamically across large clusters of GPUs without re-converting signals back to electrical (which destroys power-saving benefits).

> Current Limitations: Existing OCS solutions lack packet-decoding capabilities and rely on rigid, round-robin scheduling schemes, meaning optical switching technology must heavily evolve alongside CPO.

$Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) $Amkor Tech(AMKR.US) $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) $Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) $Lumentum(LITE.US) $Intel(INTC.US) $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US)