SILITH Technology and United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TWSE: 2303) have reached a mass production milestone for silicon photonics, marking the first delivery of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) wafers from UMC’s 12-inch semiconductor fabrication facility in Singapore.
The companies said the achievement advances their collaboration to scale silicon photonics manufacturing for artificial intelligence (AI) and hyperscale data center applications, where demand for high-speed optical interconnects continues to grow.
The production combines SILITH’s silicon photonics design with UMC’s 12-inch wafer manufacturing and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process technology. The partners said the platform supports high-volume production of SILITH’s 1.6-terabit silicon photonics platform, which is designed for next-generation AI networking infrastructure.
According to the companies, the joint engineering team moved the platform from development to production readiness in 18 months. The technology has demonstrated production-level yield and reliability and has been qualified by a leading cloud infrastructure customer for volume deployment.
The milestone reflects increasing industry efforts to commercialize silicon photonics as AI workloads drive higher bandwidth requirements inside data centers. Optical interconnects are becoming increasingly important for connecting processors, accelerators and networking equipment while reducing power consumption and latency compared with traditional electrical connections.
Jason Zhang, Chief Technology Officer of SILITH, said the rapid growth of AI is accelerating demand for optical bandwidth across data center infrastructure.
He said the company’s silicon photonics platform is being developed to support pluggable optical modules, co-packaged optics (CPO) and future optical input/output (I/O) architectures. The partnership with UMC, he added, combines advanced photonics design with high-volume semiconductor manufacturing to improve performance, scalability and production efficiency.
GC Hung, Senior Vice President of UMC, said the milestone demonstrates the foundry’s ability to manufacture complex semiconductor technologies at commercial scale.
He said Singapore plays an important role in UMC’s technology development strategy, enabling rapid production ramp-up for silicon photonics products. Hung added that the company plans to continue expanding its manufacturing capabilities to meet growing customer demand for photonics-based applications.
Alongside the commercial production of SILITH’s first silicon photonics product, UMC said it plans to make its own 12-inch silicon photonics platform available to customers for product development in 2027.
The companies are also extending their technology roadmap beyond the current generation. Building on the commercialization of SILITH’s 200G-per-lane silicon photonics products, they are jointly developing a 400G-per-lane platform.
The next-generation platform will use high-speed silicon Mach-Zehnder Modulators (MZMs) to enable 400G-per-lane optical transmission while maintaining the manufacturing scalability and cost advantages of CMOS-compatible silicon technology.
Beyond silicon-based modulators, UMC said it is collaborating with ecosystem partners on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN)-based photonics technologies for future ultra-high-bandwidth optical interconnects.
The company said these technologies, combined with its advanced semiconductor packaging capabilities, are expected to support highly integrated optical engine modules for co-packaged optics, optical I/O and other advanced AI computing architectures.
The latest milestone comes as semiconductor manufacturers and cloud infrastructure providers invest heavily in photonics technologies to address the increasing bandwidth and energy efficiency requirements of AI infrastructure. Silicon photonics is widely viewed as a key technology for enabling faster data movement between processors and networking systems as AI models continue to grow in size and complexity.
