SPIE Photonics West 2026 marked a pivotal moment for the photonics industry. The event signaled a shift in how co-packaged optics (CPO) is perceived and developed.
CPO was once seen as a long-term optical challenge. Now, it’s widely recognized as an imminent systems-engineering problem that needs coordinated advances across multiple engineering domains.
This blog post dives into the key themes, technologies, and industry implications highlighted at the event.
CPO Moves From Concept to Systems Reality
With more than 20,000 attendees, Photonics West 2026 showcased a maturing ecosystem. CPO isn’t speculative anymore—it’s becoming a near-term necessity for data centers and AI infrastructure strained by bandwidth, power, and thermal limits.
Multi-Domain Engineering Takes Center Stage
Across panels and technical sessions, experts kept coming back to the need for concurrent multi-physics modeling. Optical design can’t be separated from thermal, mechanical, and electrical considerations anymore.
This approach mirrors what’s already common in aerospace and automotive industries, where system-level tradeoffs get evaluated early and often. Designers have to juggle optical coupling efficiency, heat dissipation, mechanical tolerances, and signal integrity all at once.
The complexity of these interactions pushes CPO from a component-level innovation into a full-blown systems-engineering discipline.
Simulation and AI-Scale Design Enablement
One of the most consistent messages from the conference was the growing importance of GPU-accelerated simulation. As AI workloads scale, engineers need ways to explore huge CPO design spaces efficiently.
GPU-Accelerated Multi-Physics Modeling
Advanced simulation platforms now let engineers evaluate thousands of design permutations. They can optimize optical couplers, electro-optical links, and thermal pathways in parallel.
This capability is essential for keeping up with the extreme performance and power-density demands of AI accelerators. Without robust simulation infrastructure, late-stage design failures become a real threat and can seriously delay production readiness.
Materials and Manufacturing Break Through Key Bottlenecks
Beyond modeling, Photonics West 2026 shined a light on real progress in materials and manufacturing technologies. These advances aim to overcome CPO’s most stubborn barriers.
Diamond Thermal Management and Test Innovation
Coherent introduced bondable diamond thermal spreaders that dissipate heat up to five times more efficiently than copper. These materials directly tackle localized hotspots between silicon photonics and cooling plates—a critical headache in densely integrated CPO assemblies.
Quantifi Photonics rolled out a PCI-based continuous-wave external laser source designed for production-grade environments. The solution targets the increased channel counts and integration complexity that come with CPO, underscoring how test and metrology are just as vital as optical intellectual property.
Photonics Expands Beyond Connectivity
Several announcements hinted that photonics platforms are evolving past data transport. They’re moving into broader system-level roles.
Integrated Security and Quantum Entropy
Coherent and Quside showed off a mass-manufacturable quantum entropy source built from VCSEL processes. This development makes it plausible to embed hardware-level security primitives directly into mainstream photonic and electronic systems.
Such capabilities could become more valuable as AI and hyperscale infrastructures demand higher levels of trust and resilience. It’s exciting to think about where this could lead next.
Industry Outlook: From Readiness to Scale
Hyperscalers made a strong showing, which really highlights the growing interest in photonics for rack-level AI interconnects. Still, several speakers pointed out that real progress hinges on maturing every layer of the engineering and supply chain stack.
- Making multi-physics simulation workflows practical
- Scaling up advanced materials like diamond
- Setting standards for high-throughput CPO testing and metrology
- Pushing forward interoperable CPO and pluggable transceiver standards
People at SPIE Photonics West 2026 seemed pretty convinced: we’ll probably see some big steps in systems engineering and platform interoperability over the next year.
Here is the source article for this story: Did SPIE Photonics West 2026 Set the Stage for Scale-up Optics?