According to TrendForce, TSMC is currently cooperating with major customers such as NVIDIA and Broadcom to form a silicon photonics technology team with more than 200 researchers, with the goal of completing the project in the second half of 2024. It will be put into commercial use in 2025.
Reports claim that TSMC’s Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) provides heterogeneous integration of photonic ICs (PICs) and electronic ICs (EICs), reducing energy consumption by 40% and is expected to significantly increase customers’ adoption willingness.
Luo Huaijia, CEO of the Optoelectronic Technology Industry Association (PIDA), said that silicon photonics technology has always been an important focus in the field of optoelectronics, and optoelectronic products are developing in the direction of being light, thin, compact, and energy-saving.
Silicon photonics and co-packaged optical components (CPO) have become a new trend in the industry. There are rumors on the Internet that TSMC is working with major customers such as Broadcom and Nvidia to jointly develop the products, and large orders will begin as early as the second half of next year.
It was reported in September this year that TSMC is highly optimistic about silicon photonics technology. TSMC Vice President Yu Zhenhua recently publicly stated: “If we can provide a good silicon photonics integrated system, we can solve the two key issues of energy efficiency and AI computing power. This will be a new paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era.”
Luo Huaijia analyzed that GlobalFoundries should be the first wafer foundry for manufacturing optical transceivers, which adopts FD-SOI technology integration solution; Intel currently also has 400Gb/s optical transceiver solutions, in addition to its own ASIC Or FPGA, in addition to being used in Switch IC, Intel even plans to expand its silicon photonics solutions to the automotive market and use them in Mobileye’s optical radar in 2025.
