Corning’s CEO says “you’re going to hear a lot more” about co-packaged optics, or CPO
Broadcom and Corning have struck a deal to work together on co-packaged optics, or CPO, infrastructure that the two companies say will significantly increase processing capacity and scaling within data centers.
CPO integrates both data center optics and silicon on a single, packaged substrate, supporting the scaling of data center networks by reducing cost, reducing power consumption and providing greater bandwidth and density, as Broadcom explains.
Corning will supply optical components including fiber “harnesses” or connectors for Broadcom’s Bailly CPO system. The latter is the industry’s first CPO-based 51.2 TBps Ethernet switch; when it was launched last year, Broadcom said that Bailly enables an optical interconnect to operate at 70% lower power consumption and 8x better silicon area efficiency, compared to pluggable transceiver solutions.
Broadcom just announced the third generation of the Bailly CPO, which relies on eight silicon photonics-based, 6.4 TBps optical engines that are co-packaged with Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk5 Ethernet switch chip.
“Broadcom has spent years perfecting our CPO platform solutions, as evidenced by the maturity of our second generation 100G/lane products and the ecosystem readiness,” said Near Margalit, who is VP and general manager of the Optical Systems Division at Broadcom. “With our third-generation 200G/lane CPO solutions, we are once again setting the bar for the next-generation of AI interconnects. Our commitment to delivering the industry-leading performance, power efficiency, and scalability will help our customers meet the demands of today’s rapidly evolving AI infrastructure.”
“The explosive growth of AI workloads is driving unprecedented demands on interconnect bandwidth. Our multi-year collaboration with Corning on high density fiber connectivity solutions for the TH5-Bailly CPO system has resulted in breakthrough performance at scale,” said Sheng Zhang, CTO of Broadcom’s Optical Systems Division. “We’re thrilled to deepen this relationship as we work together on the next-generation 200G per lane CPO solutions—unlocking even greater power efficiency and bandwidth density for the next generation of AI-powered data centers.”
Broadcom also announced a number of other CPO collaborators and “milestones toward mass deployment” of CPO, including production of its 51.2T CPO Ethernet switch in a pluggable, 3RU form factor by Delta Electronics; production by Micas Networks of the TH5-Bailly switch system; a production release from Foxconn Interconnect Technology of CPO LGA (Land Grid Array) sockets and other components; and Twinstar Technologies reaching “milestone volume shipments” of CPO fiber cables to enable scaling.
Benoit Fleury, director of CPO business development at Corning Optical Communications, said that the latest Bailly CPO collaboration “enables unprecedented speeds and bandwidth concentrations with lower power consumptions and costs.”
Speaking at this week’s JP Morgan annual Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks spoke confidently about the growth opportunities ahead of his company, despite global uncertainty around issues such as tariffs. Corning, he said, had “modeled the impact of different slowdown scenarios on our growth plan— including a shock case using the worst downturn in the last 25 years—and we were well within our risk adjustment.” Now these were just a couple of the many reasons we reiterated our high confidence plan despite the current global uncertainty. ”
One of the major reasons he cited was generative AI and the resulting optical demand. Weeks noted that Corning’s enterprise business—which includes sales of optical tech inside data centers—saw a record $2 billion in sales last year and earlier this year, the company upgraded its expected compound annual growth rate for the segment from 25% to 30%. This is being driven by the scale-out of data center networks, or the increasing numbers of connected AI nodes and the need to connect greater distances between GPU clusters with fiber.
“This opportunity alone is 2x to 3x the size of our existing $2 billion enterprise business, if we are successful technically,” Weeks added.
Weeks also specifically called out the newly announced Broadcom deal as an example of support for co-packaged optics or CPO.
“You’re going to hear a lot more about this area in the near future,” he added.
