TSMC is preparing to ramp up production of a new kind of chip technology that moves data with light instead of just electricity, according to a report from DQ India (via Bing News). Capacity for photonic integrated circuits, or PICs, is projected to surge to 25,000 wafers per month by 2028.
So what are PICs? As the report explains, they are responsible for converting, routing, and coupling electrical and optical signals — in other words, translating between the electrical world of traditional chips and the optical world of light-based data transfer. The technology sits at the center of TSMC's COUPE platform, and the report notes that progress on COUPE is a key focus for the market.
According to the same report, NVIDIA and Broadcom are being eyed as early customers for COUPE. Both companies are major players in the kind of high-performance and networking chips where moving huge volumes of data quickly is a growing bottleneck.
The move fits a broader industry shift. A separate report from economy.ac (via Google News) argues that advanced packaging is "breaking through the limits of process shrinkage" and reshaping the competitive landscape, with a TSMC-led reorganization of the semiconductor backend ecosystem accelerating.
Taken together, the two reports point to the same theme: as squeezing transistors ever smaller gets harder, chipmakers are turning to how chips are connected and packaged — including with light — to keep performance climbing.
Why it matters: if TSMC can scale optical chip technology as projected, it could ease one of the biggest constraints on AI and data-center hardware — the speed at which data moves between chips.