The U.S. chip giant Broadcom partners with China's Tencent to develop co-packaged optics network switch for cloud infrastructure

By Kate Yuan

The U.S. chip maker Broadcom announced a strategic partnership with China's Tencent on August 22 to accelerate the adoption of high bandwidth co-packaged optics (CPO) network switches for cloud infrastructure. 

Tencent will define the system architecture, while Broadcom will provide its Tomahawk switch chip and Silicon Photonics Chiplets In Package (SCIP) optical engines, according to Broadcom. Ruijie Networks will verify the design, manufacture and test the full CPO switch system. 

The adoption of CPO can significantly reduce power consumption and cost compared to pluggable optical transceivers.

Near Margalit, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Optical Systems Division, said, “The cooperation with Tencent will enable the industry’s first 25.6-Tbps CPO system for hyperscale data center field deployment.”

“Customers' demand for higher bandwidth drives Tencent to continuously scale up our network,” said Sage Zou, vice president of Tencent Cloud. “The cooperation with Broadcom in CPO technology will bring higher bandwidth for applications such as AI/ML and HPC, and solve the power constraints from the accelerated workload growth.”