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TSMC Jumps Into Silicon Photonics, Lays Out Roadmap For 12.8 Tbps COUPE On-Package Interconnect
Anton Shilov on April 26, 2024 4:00 PM EST Optical connectivity – and especially silicon photonics – is expected to become a crucial technology to enable connectivity for next-generation datacenters, particularly those designed HPC applications. With ever-increasing bandwidth requirements needed to keep up with (and keep scaling out) system performance, copper signaling alone won't be enough to keep up.
To that end, several companies are developing silicon photonics solutions, including fab providers like TSMC, who this week outlined its 3D Optical Engine roadmap as part of its 2024 North American Technology Symposium, laying out its plan to bring up to 12.8 Tbps optical connectivity to TSMC-fabbed processors. That's a transfer rate well ahead of current copper Ethernet standards – which top out at 800 Gbps – underscoring the immediate bandwidth advantage of optical interconnects for heavily-networked compute clusters, never mind the expected power savings. Ultimately, unlike many of its industry peers, TSMC has not participated in the silicon photonics market up until now, leaving this to players like GlobalFoundries.
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