Co-packaged optics market to exceed $1.3bn in 2025

Market intelligence firm, Communications Industry Researchers (CIR) predicts that sales of specialised co-packaged optical components will exceed $1.3bn in revenues in 2025 and grow to $2.7bn by 2028. 

CIR’s latest report, Markets for Co-Packaged Optics 2022-2030 looks at the latest developments in connectivity, lasers, and cooling systems for co-packaged optics as well as showing how modules will be used in four kinds of data centre. It forecasts co-packaged optics from 2022 to 2030 with breakouts by type of data centre and location (inter-building/inter-machine or rack/server) in the data centre. 

Amongst the report’s findings, it details the commercial potential of co-packaged optical components, which it says was recently demonstrated, when Senko Advanced Components acquired Cudoform for access to latter’s micro-mirror connector in a co-packaged optics application. Other co-packaged optical components in immediate demand include cooling systems and external lasers. The report also highlighted that Intel researchers recently demonstrated an eight-wavelength silicon laser array that the company believes can be integrated into a co-packaged optics package.

While CIR stated that large deployments of co-packaged optics systems may not occur until 2027, it pointed out that module manufacturers are already buying critical co-packaged optical components; a couple of years in advance, predicting that co-packaged optical components will be the first big opportunity in the coming co-packaged optics revolution.

What’s more, said the report, demand for these components will spur manufacturing to meet the demanding requirements for tight-spaced packaging and hard-to-integrate photonics. Among those increasingly focused on co-packaged optics, said the report, are merchant silicon firms, which are leveraging the latest silicon photonics technology to exploit this opportunity.