TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant, is not content with just manufacturing the most advanced chips on the planet. Now it wants light to travel inside them. The company is developing COUPE, a technology to integrate silicon photonics directly into chips or interposers, surpassing the current approach of separate optical modules on the motherboard.
COUPE: the leap from co-packaged optics to monolithic integration 💡
Until today, silicon photonics was limited to CPO technology, where the optical transceiver is an external component connected to the chip via copper traces or light guides. COUPE aims for deeper integration, embedding the optical blocks directly into the silicon or the interposer. This reduces distances, power consumption, and latency, bringing optical communication closer to the chip scale. TSMC plans to offer this solution on advanced nodes by 2025, targeting data centers and supercomputing.
Light enters the chip, but coffee remains for humans ☕
While TSMC busies itself with stuffing photons into its wafers, one can't help but wonder if light will travel faster than supplier delivery deadlines. Integrated photonics promises breakneck speeds, but on the forum we know the real bottleneck is not the transistors, but the time it takes engineers to find the correct USB cable. At least, when the chip lights up, it will be easier to see in the darkness of the server room.