Due to the rise of 5G, IoT, AI, and high-performance computing applications, datacenter trafic has grown at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30%. Furthermore, nearly three-fourths of the datacenter trafic resides within d. Due to the rise of 5G, IoT, AI, and high-performance computing applications, datacenter trafic has grown at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30%. Furthermore, nearly three-fourths of the datacenter trafic resides within datacenters. The conventional pluggable optics increases at a much slower rate than that of datacenter trafic. The gap betw. The importance of co-packaged optics (CPO). Datacenter trafic keeps growing with the expansion of data-intensive applications, such as AI and high-performance computing (HPC). Conventional pluggable optics cannot catch up with the fast-growing bandwidth density and energy eficiency requirements. Co-packaged optics (CPO) combines photonic Min Tan, S. This section breaks down the photonic interconnect link into hardware and software components, discusses accordingly their current status, challenges, as well as how they impact the integrity of the photonic link and network. Finally, this section remarks on the next milestone in the future of pho-tonic interconnect for HPC networking. 12. Optoelec. Co-packaged Optics (CPO) is an advanced packaging tech-nology for optoelectronic devices that involves upgrades in system architecture, chip fabrication, and packaging. In this section, we will mainly discuss the fabrication technology of silicon photonic chips for CPO applications. Moore's Law is a well-known phenomenon in microe-lectronics chip f. Pure-play foundries, such as TSMC, Global Foundry, Tow-erJazz, SMIC, and open-access pilot lines, such as IMEC, AMF, AIM, CUMEC are providing silicon photonics PDK with the basic component library of passive and active devices, as shown in Fig. 1. While customized structures are needed for CPO applications, the main fabrication chal-lenges for CPO.