Tower Semiconductor and Teramount Announce Technology Collaboration Connecting a Large Number of Optical Fibers to Silicon Chips

Tower Semiconductor, a leading foundry of high value analog semiconductor solutions, and Teramount, a leader in scalable solutions for connecting optical fibers to silicon chips, announced a collaboration based on Teramount's ‘PhotonicPlug’ technology and Tower’s silicon photonic ‘Bump-ready’ wafers. ‘Bump-ready’ wafers combine Tower’s highvolume PH18 silicon photonic technology with features that allow the simultaneous connection of a large number of fibers to the chip dramatically simplifying assembly into a final high speed data transport solution for datacenters and telecom networks, as well as new emerging applications in artificial intelligence and sensors. The technology enables scalable silicon photonics packaging, high yield fiber assembly and compatibility with high volume semiconductor manufacturing lines.

Tower has successfully manufactured PH18 ‘Silicon Photonic Bump-ready’ wafers that demonstrated unparalleled performance in assembly tolerances when integrated with Teramount’s ‘PhotonicPlug’ connectors solving a key bottleneck in the wider use of silicon photonics. PH18 is Tower’s high volume silicon photonic platform available to all foundry customers.

“Our joint work with Tower has been very successful in producing this innovative scalable connectivity technology in a high volume manufacturing facility,” said Hesham Taha, CEO of Teramount. “By offering this capability to the industry, Teramount solves one of the major

hurdles to further adopt optical connectivity, which is critical for so many applications that require high speed data transfers.”

Going forward, Tower and Teramount will offer this capability to customers who need silicon photonics solutions for devices ranging from transceivers to high-bandwidth switches, as well as co-packaged optics for networking and advanced computing applications.

“Through our collaboration with Teramount, we are able to offer our customers yet another tool to enable differentiated optical solutions,” said Dr. Ed Preisler, director of technology development, RF & HPA at Tower. “This feature is a powerful addition to Tower’s comprehensive portfolio of photonics technologies, which include our high volume PH18 platform, and our unique heterogeneously integrated III-V technologies.”