Co-Packaged Optics Moves from Promise to Production Planning

What it means for hiring

At the Ayar Labs co-packaged optics summit, Meta, Broadcom, AMD and others set out how ready they are for a surge in co-packaged optics demand expected in 2028, and discussed the role of the OCI multi-source agreement in getting there.

A 2028 production date means the hiring happens now, because the people are not interchangeable and cannot be trained in a year. Co-packaged optics needs engineers who are credible in photonics and in advanced packaging at the same time, and those two disciplines have historically sat in different companies, different buildings and different conferences. The individuals who bridge them are rare enough that most teams end up pairing a photonics engineer with a packaging engineer and accepting the translation cost. For the optical communications market this is the clearest signal yet of where the next three years of recruitment goes: not more transceiver designers, but people who can put optics inside a package next to silicon.

Read the original at EE Times .