Scaling AI with Chiplets & CPO

By Dave Kulansky, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm

AI's explosive growth is straining datacenter connectivity across scale-up and scale-out networks, pushing optics ever closer to the compute. This talk traces that shift from pluggable modules to near-packaged optics (NPO) to co-packaged optics (CPO), showing how chiplet architectures and heterogeneous integration enable denser, lower-power optical I/O. We examine direct-drive versus digital-drive CPO, co-design, and weigh the opportunities and challenges shaping optical interconnects for upcoming generations.