HyperLight Corporation has entered into a strategic manufacturing partnership with United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and its subsidiary Wavetek Microelectronics Corporation to enable high-volume foundry production of HyperLight’s thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) Chiplet™ Platform. The collaboration is expected to accelerate commercialization of TFLN photonics technology and support the growing infrastructure demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
The companies announced that the platform will be manufactured on both 6-inch and 8-inch wafers, combining HyperLight’s photonic architecture with the large-scale foundry manufacturing capabilities of UMC and Wavetek. The partnership represents a significant step toward bringing TFLN photonics into mainstream semiconductor production and enabling deployment at the scale required by next-generation data center networks.
Thin-film lithium niobate has long been considered a promising material for optical interconnect technologies due to its ability to deliver high modulation bandwidth, low optical loss and energy-efficient performance. As AI workloads and hyperscale cloud infrastructure continue to expand, data centers require faster and more efficient optical communication systems to handle increasing data traffic.
The TFLN Chiplet Platform is designed to address these requirements through a unified architecture capable of supporting multiple optical networking applications. The platform integrates support for short-reach intensity-modulated direct detection (IMDD) data center pluggables, longer-reach coherent optical communication modules used in datacom and telecom networks, and emerging co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions used in high-performance computing systems.
According to Mian Zhang, the platform was engineered from the outset to enable scalable manufacturing for next-generation AI infrastructure. He noted that the collaboration with UMC and Wavetek establishes a pathway for transitioning TFLN photonics from specialized deployments to large-scale production capable of supporting global demand.
The partnership builds on several years of collaboration between HyperLight and Wavetek, during which TFLN photonics progressed from a laboratory innovation to a customer-qualified high-volume manufacturing line within a 6-inch CMOS foundry environment. The addition of UMC introduces expanded manufacturing capacity through 8-inch wafer production, which is expected to help meet increasing industry demand driven by AI and cloud networking.
G C Hung said the partnership aligns with the industry’s push toward higher-bandwidth optical interconnects, including future 1.6-terabit-per-second data center connectivity. Hung added that TFLN is emerging as a key material platform capable of supporting the bandwidth requirements of next-generation networking infrastructure.
Bruce Lai emphasized that Wavetek’s role has been focused on translating TFLN technology into a production-ready process within a CMOS foundry environment. He noted that the new alliance extends that work by enabling broader market deployment and the manufacturing scale required for advanced optical systems.
Beyond high-speed networking, the TFLN Chiplet Platform is also expected to support emerging applications such as quantum computing and advanced sensing, where photonic performance and scalability are critical.
