en.Wedoany.com Reported - On July 14, Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and Singapore's SILITH jointly announced that UMC's 12-inch wafer fab in Singapore has completed the delivery of its first batch of mass-produced silicon photonics wafers. This marks the transition of the silicon photonics platform jointly developed by both parties from process development and product verification to large-scale manufacturing, supporting high-speed optical interconnect construction for next-generation AI data centers and hyperscale networks.
This mass production combines SILITH's proprietary silicon photonics architecture with UMC's capabilities in 12-inch wafer manufacturing, process integration, and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. The two teams completed the platform's transition from development to mass production in 18 months. The first batch of products has achieved the yield and reliability levels required for mass production and has passed certification from a leading global cloud infrastructure customer, enabling large-scale deployment.
The mass production platform will initially support SILITH's 1.6 terabit-per-second silicon photonics solution. This solution targets high-speed data transmission within AI clusters and hyperscale data centers, and can be used for pluggable optical modules, co-packaged optics, and subsequent optical input/output architectures. As data exchange volumes between GPUs, memory, and switching equipment increase, traditional electrical interconnects face greater pressure in terms of transmission distance, bandwidth, and power consumption. Large-scale manufacturing of silicon photonics wafers has become a critical step in expanding the supply capacity of optical interconnect devices.
UMC's Singapore fab not only handles 12-inch wafer production but also serves as an important technology R&D base. The delivery of this first batch of mass-produced wafers demonstrates that the fab has the capability to convert silicon photonics designs into stable wafer manufacturing processes, providing customers with relatively predictable production costs, product yields, and capacity ramp-up timelines. Public information has not disclosed the quantity of the first batch of wafers, monthly production scale, or specific delivery customers, so further estimation of current silicon photonics capacity is not possible.
Both parties are also expanding the silicon photonics technology roadmap. UMC and SILITH are collaborating to develop a 400G per channel pure silicon photonics platform, planning to adopt a high-speed Mach-Zehnder modulator architecture to improve single-channel transmission capacity while maintaining compatibility with CMOS processes and subsequent large-scale manufacturing conditions. SILITH has previously shipped over 8 million units of 100G and 200G per channel photonic integrated circuits, providing an existing product foundation for the introduction of the new platform.
In addition to customer-customized platforms, UMC plans to officially open its own 12-inch silicon photonics platform in 2027, allowing more customers to conduct product development and mass production introduction. The company is also advancing thin-film lithium niobate optical interconnect technology with industry partners and plans to combine advanced packaging capabilities to support co-packaged optics, optical input/output, and other highly integrated optoelectronic architectures.
The core milestone of this delivery is not the construction of a new wafer fab, but the first successful mass production of silicon photonics products at the existing 12-inch manufacturing base in Singapore. With the 1.6T platform entering commercial manufacturing, UMC's wafer foundry scope has expanded from traditional logic and specialty processes to AI data center optical interconnect chips, adding a mass production node for silicon photonics products to move from design verification to large-scale supply.
