Tower Semiconductor has crossed a significant production threshold, shipping over 5 million coherent photonic integrated circuits to Marvell Technology’s customers. The components are designed for AI data center interconnect networks, the high-speed optical highways that link massive GPU clusters together.
What silicon photonics actually does here
Tower’s coherent PICs are manufactured on what the company calls its high-volume silicon photonics platform. The “coherent” part matters because it refers to a modulation technique that squeezes more data into each optical signal, making it particularly suited for the long-reach, high-bandwidth connections that AI data center interconnect networks demand.
The chips also incorporate advanced optical packaging methods and integration of non-silicon materials, which is industry speak for combining different semiconductor materials on a single chip to optimize both the electronic and photonic functions.
Tower’s broader photonic push
