OCP Global Summit 2025: Marvell & Jabil's Next-Generation Co-Packaged Optics System

Introduction

At OCP Global Summit 2025, Marvell and Jabil jointly presented their latest Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) system design. Rather than focusing on the optical module alone, the talk centered on system integration, showing full-stack co-design across electrical chips, optical engines, system board design, cooling, manufacturing and deployment. Marvell put it bluntly: "CPO is no longer a question of 'if' but 'when'." In other words, as AI and high-performance computing demand explodes, CPO is moving out of the prototype stage and into preparation for volume production.

Key Takeaways

1. Why CPO?

Conventional pluggable optics are flexible, but they suffer from interface losses and power penalties across multiple layers. In today's 51.2T switches, the signal path passes through the BGA, PCB, connector, DSP and optical engine, one conversion after another.

CPO instead has the SerDes drive the optical engine directly, integrating the DSP, SerDes and PIC (photonic IC) on the same substrate or interposer to deliver:

• Lower power and fewer components (less packaging loss and lower power density)

• Lower latency and better bandwidth utilization

• Higher reliability and consistency

Marvell noted that CPO is not meant to replace pluggables across the board. It targets power-hungry applications such as AI training clusters, HPC and high-density data centers, where it delivers a fundamental efficiency gain.

2. System Architecture and Design Details

The CPO system shown by Marvell and Jabil is built on the Open Rack v3 standard in a 10OU rack-unit design, featuring Marvell's latest Teralynx switch chip and 6.4T/4T optical engines.

Key system features:

• Up to 100 Tb/s of front-panel bandwidth

• 16 integrated ELS modules and 64 SN-MT optical ports

• 
  Mid-board fiber connectivity to improve manufacturing yield and modular serviceability

• Support for liquid and hybrid cooling architectures, leaving room for a future fully liquid-cooled version

The control plane uses an x86 host processor with an optional BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) and supports out-of-band management. This shows Marvell is building a complete "co-packaged optics system platform" rather than just an optical module solution.

3. Modularity and a Manufacturing Mindset

Jabil shared its experience on the manufacturing side:

• A modular distributed midplane lets the main board and the optical board be tested and replaced independently, improving yield and repair efficiency.

• Separating the main PCB from the front optical board (Front Board) not only relieves space pressure but also improves reliability, maintainability and production repeatability.

• All interfaces follow blind-mate liquid-cooling connectors and OCP standard form factors, ensuring compatibility with existing data center systems.

As they emphasized: "This CPO design is not just a demo; it paves the way for mass production." Design for Manufacturability (DFM) was built into the requirements from day one.

4. Cooling and Energy-Efficiency Design

Marvell and Jabil pointed out that as optical module power density keeps rising, liquid cooling becomes inevitable. They showed a hybrid cooling design:

• The laser modules use cool airflow (at the front, on the cold aisle) to maintain optical efficiency.

• The switch chip and optical packages use cold-plate liquid cooling for higher thermal conduction efficiency.

  This hybrid approach balances flexibility and cost, allowing the same platform to be deployed across different data center environments.

5. Lessons and Challenges from Design to Production

Marvell and Jabil admitted that this is a "3D design challenge".

They had to manage the interleaved layout of fiber routing, liquid coolant, airflow and electrical paths all at once, like "going from playing chess to fighting in three-dimensional space."

The main challenges include:

• Fiber routing and ease of service

• Thermal conduction efficiency in a highly compressed liquid-cooling system

• Yield control in large-scale assembly

  To address these issues, the two teams have, since 2016, built a shared modular management system and an I3C-based firmware update architecture to keep the entire CPO system maintainable and scalable.

6. Ecosystem Collaboration and Readiness for Volume Production

Marvell and Jabil stressed that CPO's success depends on collaboration across the entire ecosystem.

The participating teams span chipmakers, packaging houses, fiber suppliers, PCB makers and system integrators.

They called on the OCP community to jointly drive standardization of rack-scale fiber management and manufacturing to solve the last-mile problem of CPO deployment.

Conclusion

This showcase from Marvell and Jabil marks CPO's shift from "proof of concept" to "system-level implementation."

Their real system design demonstrates that:

• CPO can be deployed in a modular way and fits within the existing OCP architecture.

• Manufacturability and maintainability can be achieved through DFM and standardized design.

• Cooling and fiber management are the keys to the next phase of commercialization.

CPO is no longer just a high-end experimental platform; it is the core solution as the industry moves toward "optoelectronically integrated data centers for the AI era."

Further Perspectives

1. Technical impact

   • Marvell's integration of optical engines (ELS) into the Open Rack v3 architecture shows that optical interconnect and system standardization are converging.

   • The combination of hybrid cooling and mid-board fiber connectivity is likely to become a reference architecture for future high-density AI racks.

2. Supply chain observations

   • Through this project, Jabil formally enters CPO system integration and could become a key ODM for AI optical switch modules and full-system manufacturing.

   • Marvell's CPO platform rounds out its ecosystem across Ethernet PHY, DSP and optoelectronic integration, setting up a three-way contest with Broadcom, NVIDIA and Intel.

3. Market trends

   • CPO commercialization is accelerating. From Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 to Marvell's Teralynx to Jabil's production line, the industry has moved from "prototype" to "pre-production."

   • Going forward, the OCP community will focus on "rack-scale optical interconnect standardization," enabling CPO and optical circuit switching (OCS) to coexist within the same data center architecture.