Ira Leventhal, Vice President, Research & Venture, Advantest America

My 2025 viewpoint highlighted the Era of Complexity—the convergence of AI/HPC scale, sustainability demands, and shifting geopolitics. Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration introduce new failure modes and limit test access, making shift left test essential and turning reliability into a lifecycle commitment.

Co packaged optics (CPO) is taking center stage in the Era of Complexity in 2026. As AI/HPC push beyond copper's limits, CPO enables 200 G/lane and 1.6 T on a path to 3.2 T. The aggressive ramp demands test solutions that are truly scalable and HVM ready—not on paper, but in practice, and quickly.

This isn't just a technology shift; it's an ecosystem shift. Optics, compute silicon, advanced 2.5D/3D packaging, and high stack memory are now part of a tightly coupled electro optical and thermal mechanical ecosystem. Success requires unprecedented collaboration across the full value chain—aligning on manufacturable approaches that deliver both bandwidth density and extreme quality.

To keep pace, the industry is moving test content left. Performance and reliability checks once reserved for final test are being executed at wafer sort, singulated die, and stack level stages to ensure known good optical engines before full assembly. Elements of system level behavior are being validated earlier to strengthen coverage and reduce late surprises. And across the flow, cleanliness discipline, precise alignment, and active thermal control become first principles of yield.

CPO will reward companies that view test not as a gate, but as a continuous, end to end capability that scales with the product—from development through high volume manufacturing and into the field. That mindset, coupled with tight cross ecosystem collaboration, is how we’ll turn optics in package from promise into robust, reliable scale.