Workshop: Standardization vs. Customization: Pluggables, CPO, or NPO — What’s the Right Path?

This workshop examines the balance between standardization and customization across next-generation optical interconnect architectures, including pluggable optics—such as eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and emerging near-package optics (NPO).

Recent developments—such as liquid-cooled high-power pluggables, evolving CPO reliability and manufacturing data, and increasing emphasis on interoperability—are reshaping long-standing assumptions about system design, deployment, and scaling. At the same time, XPO and NPO are gaining attention as a potential middle ground between modular and fully integrated approaches.

Organized into two sessions, the first session focuses on technology discussions, while the second session focuses on standardization vs. customization.

The workshop will explore how these trends impact architectural trade-offs, ecosystem readiness, operational flexibility, and total cost of ownership. It will also address a central industry question: is the ecosystem converging on more standardized optical interconnect solutions, or will application-specific customization continue to dominate future AI and data-center deployments?