Tower Semiconductor and Scintil Photonics have announced the world's first single-chip DWDM light engine for AI infrastructure. Scintil's SHIP (Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics) technology integrates lasers, photodiodes, and modulators onto a standard 300mm silicon photonics wafer by bonding small InP/III-V semiconductor dies to the buried oxide layer, then etching distributed feedback lasers via photolithography. The resulting LEAF Light photonic integrated circuit delivers 8 or 16 wavelengths per fiber port, enabling up to 1.6 Tb/s per fiber and a 'slow and wide' architecture that spreads bandwidth across multiple channels. This approach reduces latency between GPUs in scale-up networks, potentially doubling GPU utilization rates. Scintil and Tower plan to ship tens of thousands of units by end of 2026, scaling by an order of magnitude in 2027, ahead of planned customer deployments in 2028.
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