LIVE WEBINAR | CO-PACKAGED OPTICS: POWERING THE NEXT WAVE OF AI INFRASTRUCTURE

Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) is approaching a critical inflection point. Positioned as a dual lever for bandwidth scaling and power consumption reduction, CPO has become a cornerstone of the AI data center development, with ecosystem owners such as NVIDIA and Broadcom placing it at the heart of their next-generation architectures.

CPO fundamentally disrupts the traditional pluggable optical transceiver paradigm by bringing the optical path in close proximity to the logic layer (whether at the proximity of Switch ASIC for scale-out, or alongside GPUs and HBM stacks for scale-up). At its core, a CPO module integrates dies of different natures onto a common interposer. Among those dies, the Optical Engine consists of a 3D integrated Electronic IC / Photonic IC stack serving as its most critical building block. This integration relies heavily on the advanced manufacturing capabilities of leading foundries and OSATs, including TSMC, Intel Foundry, and ASE.

Scaling photonics packaging to meet high-volume production demands requires bridging a fundamental gap: making photonic architectures fully compatible with mainstream microelectronics processes while driving adoption of established packaging standards (Fan-Out, Hybrid Bonding, Through-Silicon Vias) within the photonics community.

This presentation will deliver a structured overview of the CPO market landscape, covering technology maturity, key players, and ecosystem dynamics. Drawing on Yole Group’s latest analysis, it will highlight the specificities of photonics packaging, associated market forecasts, and the critical challenges that must be addressed before CPO reaches mass deployment.

Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already impacting our lives at an almost unbelievable pace. The addition of situational context to AI, and real-time access to AI analysis through augmented reality and spatial computing, will only stand to further increase this impact. But, despite the incredible leaps in processing power that have enabled these advances in AI, memory and interconnect bandwidth have not scaled at the same rate. This leaves systems developers facing the need to overcome these performance barriers and in parallel deliver significant improvements in the energy efficiency of datacenters.

In this presentation we will focus on silicon photonics and its role in addressing these challenges. We will discuss how, although silicon photonics systems may be manufactured using 45nm or 65nm CMOS design rules, their fabrication remains among the most technically demanding in the semiconductor industry. This will be highlighted by considering examples such as the fabrication of silicon and silicon nitride waveguides, optical fiber coupling technologies, and next generation materials for modulators and photo detectors.

Co‑packaged optics (CPO) is a key enabling technology for next‑generation, high‑bandwidth, energy‑efficient computing. This webinar discusses how Lam Research’s advanced packaging equipment innovations address critical CPO integration challenges in heterogeneous die integration including fine‑pitch interconnects like hybrid bonding pads, interdie gapfill, and through silicon /dielectric vias. The session highlights how process modules such as deposition, etch, clean, and packaging‑specific solutions work together to enable scalable, manufacturable CPO architectures, accelerating optical‑electrical convergence in advanced systems.