Feature
Silicon Photonics’ Fab Future
CMOS manufacturing has been harnessed for optical transceivers, and some companies are now looking to build photonic circuits for sensing, quantum science and more.
A GlobalFoundries cleanroom. [GlobalFoundries]
In April 2024, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), announced that it was to start producing silicon photonic chips. This was not a novelty in the semiconductor world, given that several other companies had made similar steps years or even decades earlier. But it underscored the growing importance of integrated photonics to electronics manufacturers, which see the technology as key to maximizing capacity and minimizing energy use in data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) processors.
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