Taiwanese firms form tech silicon photonics alliance

Taipei, Sept. 3 (CNA) A group of over 30 companies, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), announced the formation of the Silicon Photonics Industry Alliance (SiPhIA) Tuesday.

At a launch event for the alliance at SEMICON Taiwan, K.C. Hsu (徐國晉), TSMC's vice president of Integrated Interconnect & Packaging, said that as the artificial intelligence (AI) era requires massive computing power, "energy efficiency has become a significant issue."

Silicon as a medium for optical transmission has some promising features, such as low power consumption, extensive transmission distance, and lower costs, he added.

"Taiwan has a strong semiconductor industry foundation, so naturally we have the corresponding advantage in advancing in the field of silicon photonics," Hsu said.

Hsu said the new alliance would "push for specifications for related technologies and integrate collaboration of the entire ecosystem," to help Taiwan become an indispensable base of the industry of AI technology.

Tien Wu (吳田玉), CEO of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), which specializes in IC packaging solutions and one of the companies that led the setup of the alliance along with TSMC, said at the ceremony that as the hardware has become the new bottleneck for AI development, "light" has become an optimal solution.

Wu was referring to the fact that traditional chip hardware is unlikely to keep pace with the demand for chip efficiency in an AI era.

"The density of chips is getting higher and higher, the demand for the efficiency and speed of connection and heat transfer [inside the chip] is getting stronger," Wu said. "These have come into conflict with the physical limit of metal materials [traditionally used for the production of chip]."

The pressure, but also the opportunity, represented by this bottleneck is "something that we, who have been in this industry for 40 years, have never seen before," he added.

Silicon photonics has been researched for years, Wu said, "but due to its cost it has remained in the stage of small quantity production."

"However, the pressure and the tremendous commercial opportunity brought by AI will force the hardware technologies to accelerate, meaning that silicon photonics will arrive earlier than we have thought," the ASE CEO added.

As Taiwan dominates leading-edge chip production, "there is a chance that silicon photonics can break many physical limits we are currently meeting so that new ways for designing the system would appear," Wu said.

"This [breakthrough] is not something that can be achieved by one company, and we also need the government to call on all the participants in the ecosystem," he said.

Representing the Ministry of Economic Affairs at Tuesday's launch ceremony was Industrial Development Administration Director General Yang Chih-ching (楊志清).

The government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is also one of the alliance members. Other members include MediaTek, Quanta Computer, Synopsys, AUO, and Foxconn.