Founder: NPO Trend Accelerates, Focusing on TIA/Driver Chips

Founder released a research report stating that Next Packaging Optical (NPO) technology, with its advantages of ultra-low power consumption, ultra-low latency, high-density integration, and high reliability, is becoming an important technological direction for the next generation of high-speed optical interconnects, prompting major companies like Huawei and Alibaba to make strategic investments. The report indicates that linear drive technology has become a key pathway for reducing power consumption in NPO, and TIA and Driver chips, as core components, are expected to benefit. With the launch of the OPENNPO project and rapid deployment by CSP companies like Tencent Cloud, there is broad potential for the penetration of domestic TIA/Driver chips. Key points from Founder are as follows: Industry Giants Accelerate the Roadmap for NPO Next Packaging Optical (NPO) technology is becoming a crucial layout direction for industry giants in the realm of high-speed optical interconnects, leveraging its advantages of ultra-low power consumption, ultra-low latency, high-density integration, and high reliability. In July 2026, Huawei, in collaboration with over 20 partners from the industry chain, including China Mobile Limited Research Institute, JD Cloud, Baidu, and the China Electronics Standardization Institute, jointly launched the OPENNPO project and initiated the first MSA for NPO optical interconnects in China, aiming to establish an open and unified standard system for NPO. In July 2026, Tencent Cloud executives stated at the WAIC conference that the company would deploy domestically produced computing resources on a large scale, with an expectation to deploy NPO super nodes in the fourth quarter of 2026, while calling for unified NPO industry standards both domestically and internationally. Trendforce reported that NPO has become a focus area for CSP companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, predicting that the CPO/NPO market size will surpass $39 billion by 2030. Linear Drive Technology as a Key Pathway for Reducing NPO Power Consumption, with TIA and Driver Chips Expected to Benefit A 3.2T NPO is equivalent to eight 400G optical modules, but its size is significantly reduced, thus balancing density, latency, and power consumption becomes critical to NPO design. While traditional DSP architectures have good compatibility, they fail to effectively address power consumption issues. The linear drive solution, with its advantages of low latency and low power consumption, can assist NPOs in achieving high-density link connections and has become an important path forward. In traditional pluggable optical modules, TIA and Driver chips play the most crucial role in signal receive and transmit amplification, and in the linear drive NPO layout, they need to take on some signal compensation and linearization tasks that were originally handled by DSPs. Alibaba Cloud's 3.2T NPO solution, set to be released in 2026, is based on two 16-channel transceiver integrated silicon photonic chips, combined with linear drive Driver/TIA chips, with the PIC and EIC inverted integrated on an mSAP substrate, demonstrating the potential for rapid mass production with a typical power consumption of approximately 20W, significantly lower than that of DSP solutions with the same bandwidth. In 2026, Tencent also released a linear architecture 3.2T NPO solution utilizing TIA and Driver on the official WeChat account of the Goose Factory. The development of TIA and Driver is expected to benefit from the rapid implementation of the linear drive NPO solution, and currently, the supply of high-end TIA and Driver chips is still dominated by foreign companies like Marvell, Semtech, and MACOM, presenting broad prospects for domestic penetration in the future. Risk Warnings The risks of NPO technology development falling short of expectations; the risks of CSP capital expenditure not meeting expectations; the risks of AI development falling short of expectations.