ECOC 2025 industry reflections - Part 2

Part 2: More industry figures share their thoughts after attending ECOC 2025 in Copenhagen: Lumentum's Rafik Ward, Scintil Photonics' CEO, Matt Crowley, Rob Shore of Nokia, and Jeff Hutchins of the OIF and Ranovus. 

Nokia's stand at ECOC.

Rafik Ward, Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Lumentum

At ECOC 2025, I saw a nice uptick in the discussion about co-packaged optics with a clearer view to commercialisation.

While co-packaged optics has been discussed for nearly a decade, we are moving from a world of pretty slides and architecture diagrams to one where increasingly large statistical data sets are shown. Meta showed co-packaged optics data over 15 million port hours with significant improvements with regard link failures. Similarly, Broadcom has been showing statistical performance across increasingly large datasets in the last year.

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The compound complexity of co-packaged optics

Part 1: The OIF’s co-packaging initiative

Large-scale data centres consume huge amounts of power; one building on a data centre campus can consume 100MW. But there is a limit as to the overall power that can be supplied.

Jeff Hutchins

The challenge facing data centre operators is that networking, used to link the equipment inside the data centre, continues to consume more and more power.

That means less power remains for the servers; the compute that does the revenue-generating work.

This is forcing a rethink regarding networking and explains the growing interest in co-packaged optics, a technique that effectively adds optical input-output (I/O) to a chip.

Two industry organisations - the OIF and The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) - have each started work to identify the requirements needed for co-packaged optics adoption.

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