[News] UMC Announces First Delivery of Mass-Produced Silicon Photonics Wafers from Singapore 12-Inch Fab

Taiwan’s foundry UMC and Singapore-based silicon photonics chip designer SILITH announced on July 14 the first delivery of mass-produced silicon photonics wafers from UMC’s 12-inch fab in Singapore. The milestone marks the transition of silicon photonics from development to high-volume production and will support 1.6T solutions for AI and hyperscale data centers. The platform has achieved production-grade performance with high yield and has been qualified by a leading cloud infrastructure customer for volume deployment, according to UMC’s press release.

According to Nikkei, SILITH will be UMC’s first major customer for its new 12-inch silicon photonics production. The report adds that SILITH’s customers include leading optical transceiver makers such as Innolight and Coherent, both key suppliers to NVIDIA and Google.

In addition to the successful commercialization of the first silicon photonics product for a customer, UMC is making its own 12-inch silicon photonics platform available for customer product development in 2027, its press release notes.

Expanding the Silicon Photonics Roadmap

Building on the successful commercialization of SILITH’s 200G/lane silicon photonics products, UMC and SILITH are extending their silicon photonics roadmap to support next-generation 400G-per-lane optical interconnects.

Looking further ahead, UMC senior vice president G.C. Hung, as cited by Nikkei, said the company aims to debut an open silicon photonics platform by 2028 to help customers develop a broader range of optical chips and silicon photonics technologies.

UMC also plans to begin offering advanced packaging services in 2027, enabling photonic chips to be connected to an interposer that shortens electrical paths to processors and improves connectivity speed, according to Nikkei. The press release also notes that UMC is collaborating with ecosystem partners to develop thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN)-based solutions for future ultra-high-bandwidth optical interconnects.

TrendForce forecasts that the CPO/NPO market will surpass US$39 billion by 2030, with growth accelerating sharply between 2028 and 2029 as scale-up architectures begin incorporating optical interconnect technologies.

Read more

• Optical Interconnects Become Critical to AI Factory Expansion; CPO/NPO Market Expected to Exceed US$39 Billion by 2030, Says TrendForce
• [News] TSMC PIC Capacity Seen Surging to 25K Wafers/Month by 2028; NVIDIA, Broadcom Eyed as Early COUPE Customers

(Photo credit: UMC)