TSMC is collaborating with Broadcom and Nvidia in a new direction. The companies have formed a research group of more than 200 employees who will develop high-speed computing chips based on the new principles. Production is expected to start in the second half of 2024.

What is known

The semiconductor industry is under tremendous pressure today. After experiencing the massive scarcity created by the pandemic, we now have a demand for faster data transfer with zero signal delay as AI applications are flooding into most technology sectors.

This means that the methods of using electricity as a signal transmission tool that human beings have used so far are no longer effective. Advanced silicon photonics technology works by converting electricity into light, which greatly increases data transfer speeds.

TSMC claims that silicon photonics represents a new era for semiconductors. TSMC vice president Douglas Yu said that if TSMC succeeds in developing a suitable silicon photonic integration system in the coming years, two major challenges – energy efficiency and artificial intelligence computing power – can be overcome.

Chips based on silicon photonics and CPO are expected to be several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything we have today. However, it is too early to talk about specific details.

It is interesting that the integration of individual components of silicon photonics and custom integrated circuits (ASICs) into a single module using co-packaged optical technology is already being used to some extent by Microsoft and Meta in their next-generation network architectures. Silicon photonics technology was introduced by Intel in 2010 and its mission was to transform traditional electricity. It is currently limited to the data center and server markets due to its high cost.