SILITH, UMC reach PIC milestone
The partners have begun mass production of silicon photonic ICs for AI optical interconnects and unveiled a roadmap toward 400G/lane silicon photonics and future TFLN-based platforms.
SILITH Technology and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) have achieved a key milestone in silicon photonics manufacturing with the first mass-production wafer delivery of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) from UMC's 12-inch fabrication facility in Singapore.
The milestone marks the transition of SILITH's 1.6T silicon photonics platform from development to high-volume manufacturing, combining the company's photonics design expertise with UMC's silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technology and 12-inch wafer production capabilities.
The platform reached production readiness in 18 months and has been qualified by a leading cloud infrastructure customer for volume deployment.
The companies said the platform is designed to address growing demand for high-speed optical interconnects in AI and hyperscale data centers, supporting applications ranging from pluggable optics to co-packaged optics (CPO) and future optical I/O architectures.
Looking ahead, SILITH and UMC plan to extend their roadmap to 400G/lane optical interconnects using high-speed silicon Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs).
UMC is also collaborating with ecosystem partners to develop thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN)-based photonics technologies and expects to make its 12-inch silicon photonics platform available for customer product development in 2027.
