Recently, at the HotCHIPS conference in California, USA, Intel demonstrated an 8-core 528-thread processor with 1TB/s silicon photonic interconnect. Now, there are rumors that TSMC will also invest more than 200 people to form an advance research and development team to jointly develop silicon photonics and co-packaged optical components with major customers such as Broadcom and NVIDIA. It will begin to receive large orders as early as the second half of next year, aiming at the business opportunities of ultra-high-speed computing chips based on silicon photonics processes that will come next year.
Facing the demand for massive data (rights protection) transmission caused by artificial intelligence (AI), silicon photonics and co-packaged optical components (CPO) have become a new trend in the industry.
Regarding related rumors, TSMC stated that it does not respond to customer and product status.
However, TSMC is highly optimistic about silicon photonics technology. TSMC Vice President Yu Zhenhua recently stated publicly, "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."
Silicon photonics is a hot topic in the industry at the "SEMICONTaiwan 2023 International Semiconductor Equipment Exhibition" that just concluded a few days ago. Semiconductor giants such as TSMC and ASE have delivered special lectures on related topics. The main reason is that AI applications are blooming everywhere. How to make huge amounts of Problems such as faster data transmission speed and no delay in reaching signals have come to the fore. The traditional method of using electricity as a signal transmission method is no longer sufficient. Silicon photonics converts electricity into light with faster transmission speed. It has become a new generation technology highly anticipated by the industry to increase the speed of massive data transmission.
TSMC, Intel, NVIDIA, Broadcom and other international semiconductor indicator companies have successively launched silicon photonics and co-packaged optical component technology layouts. Explosive growth in the overall market can be seen as soon as 2024.
It is reported in the industry that TSMC is working with major customers such as Broadcom and Nvidia to develop new products such as silicon photonics and co-packaged optical components. The process technology has been extended from 45nm to 7nm. There will be good news as soon as 2024. It will enter the mass production stage in 2025, which is expected to bring new business opportunities to TSMC.
According to industry insiders, TSMC has assembled about 200 advanced research and development teams, and is expected to introduce silicon photonics into computing processes such as CPUs and GPUs in the future. Since the original electronic transmission lines have been changed to faster transmission speeds, the computing power will be dozens of times that of existing computing processors. It is still in the research and development and thesis academic stage. The industry is highly optimistic that related technologies are expected to become a new driving force for TSMC’s explosive growth in operations in the next few years (rights protection).
According to industry analysis, high-speed data transmission still uses pluggable optical components. As transmission speeds rapidly advance and enter the 800G generation, and enter higher transmission rates such as 1.6T to 3.2T in the future, power loss and heat dissipation management issues will be the biggest problems. The solution introduced by the semiconductor industry is to integrate silicon photonic optical components and switch application-specific chips (ASICs) into a single module through CPO packaging technology. This solution has begun to obtain certification from major manufacturers such as Microsoft and Meta and is adopted in new generation network architectures.
Even though CPO technology has just entered the market, the production cost is still high. As the advanced process advances to 3nm, AI computing will drive the demand for high-speed transmission and further drive the restructuring of high-speed network architecture. It is expected that CPO technology will be a technology that cannot be ignored and is necessary, and will enter the market in large numbers after 2025.