INTEL KEYNOTE: Advanced packaging as the critical enabler. WHAT ARE THE SUCCESS FACTORS?

Nick Psaila, formerly of OptoScribe and now leading co-packaged optics (CPO) development at Intel Foundry, delivered the keynote at Optica Gamma Brussels 2026. His talk cut straight to the core problem: AI systems are no longer compute-limited, they are IO-limited, and copper interconnects are running out of road. Psaila laid out why CPO is not a future technology but a present-tense supply chain emergency. With at least five one-gigawatt data centers expected online this year, and projections of over 100 million 1600G-equivalent optical links per facility, he warned the entire photonics supply chain, from PIC fabs to FAU manufacturers to assembly and metrology equipment providers, that volume investment is required now. The talk then moved into advanced packaging as the critical enabler. Psaila argued that CPO is as much a packaging challenge as a photonics one, and that the industry needs to abandon artisan assembly processes in favour of wafer-level, high-throughput, JEDEC-qualified manufacturing compatible with heterogeneous integration and 3D stacking. He outlined Intel's packaging spectrum from EMIB to Foveros, and introduced their work on glass core substrates, including the first demonstration of a 24-layer glass core with embedded EMIB presented at ECTC the previous week. Glass core, he argued, solves the CTE mismatch problem that increasingly limits organic substrates at large panel sizes, and opens a path to integrating 3D waveguides directly into the substrate for in-package optical interconnects. He closed with a long-range vision: panel-scale compute with an embedded optical connectivity matrix that routes signals from die-to-die to the external network within a single architecture. The Q&A that followed was one of the more direct exchanges of the day. It has been edited out of this version. Representatives from Opsidia, Ephos, and FemtoPrint each weighed in on their own approaches to direct laser writing for in-package waveguides, with Rolando Ferrini from FemtoPrint making the pointed argument that the industry cannot rely on a single supplier at this scale and that cross-licensing between European competitors may ultimately serve the market better than winner-takes-all competition. A voice-of-the-customer moment from Peter Kirkegaarde cut through the noise: demand will be high enough that there is work for everyone. Further questions addressed polymer microoptics and their reliability constraints under reflow and TCB conditions, JEDEC versus Telcordia reliability standards and why the shift matters, and how companies like Demcon are working to bring direct laser writing processes into foundry-compatible high-volume manufacturing.