Nvidia has partnered with TSMC for the development of silicon photonics.
Speaking to reporters after meeting with TSMC chairman C.C. Wei in Taiwan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the partnership was still in its earlier stages, with local media reported Huang said any results would “take a few years.”
Silicon photonics has long been touted as a solution to help data centers deal with increasing bandwidth demands and improve connectivity between servers and switches. The technology involves using silicon instead of glass as the light-transport medium to create photonic integrated circuits.
This is not the first time TSMC has been tied to a silicon photonics project. In May 2024, chipmaker TSMC announced it was partnering with Ansys, Synopsys, and Cadence to develop its silicon photonics integration system capabilities.
Later that same year, Ansys and TSMC teamed up with Microsoft to enhance the simulation and analysis of silicon photonic components using Microsoft Azure NC A100v4-series virtual machines to speed up the Ansys Lumerical FDTD photonics simulation by more than 10x.
The company is also a founding member of the Silicon Photonics Industry Alliance, a group comprised of more than 30 Taiwanese companies focused on the development of silicon photonics and co-packaged optics (CPO) technology – the advanced heterogeneous integration of optics and silicon onto a single packaged substrate.
Meanwhile, in October 2024, Nvidia participated in a $44 million Series A funding round for silicon photonics startup Xscape Photonics. According to the company, the funds would be used to accelerate the development of its ChromX platform, which it claims can maximize GPU “escape bandwidth,” reduce power consumption, and improve overall inference performance for AI workloads.
Chinese-language media has also recently reported that Nvidia plans to unveil optical switches for CPO technology at its GTC conference in March, in an effort to reduce power consumption and heat in AI servers. Sources cited in said media reports claim TSMC will begin mass production of the Switch ASIC chip in August 2025.
