Taiwanese semiconductor test interface maker WinWay has secured a strong position in co-packaged optics (CPO) testing — good news for the company and its investors, though the real large-scale business is still several years away.

• WinWay already has more than ten CPO-related projects in hand, with customers including major players worldwide.
• In the market for testing pluggable or socket-type CPO modules, over 90% of projects use WinWay's solutions.
• The company began positioning itself in this area back in 2019, when almost no one in the industry was talking about CPO.
• The bottleneck now is not whether it can be made, but whether it can be automated and mass-produced.
• Optical testing has to be both highly precise and fast enough, and many processes cannot yet be automated, so throughput cannot be raised.

Outlook: 2025 counts as year one for CPO, 2026 will lay the groundwork, small-volume demand may appear in the second half of 2027, and the truly large market will have to wait until after 2028.