The Ecosystem of Optical Fiber-to-Chip Connectors: Building Blocks of NPO and CPO for Scale-Up AI

We’ve been framing the increasing adoption of optical connectivity for scale-up applications with a clear organizing principle: Copper where you can, optics where you must. At today’s per-lane signaling rates in rack-scale AI fabrics, “must” is moving inside the rack. The reach and loss budgets available to passive copper compress with every protocol generation, and a growing number of links — even within the scale-up domain — are running into physical limits copper cannot solve with more lanes or better equalization. Co-packaged optics (CPO) has emerged as the industry’s long-term target precisely because it offers the highest potential radix and the largest power savings relative to pluggable or near-package optics (NPO) architectures. But moving from a discrete pluggable module to an optical engine sitting directly on a chip package raises a new question: How do you actually connect an optical fiber to that package with the performance, manufacturability, and serviceability rack-scale AI…