Tower Semi and Scintil announce breakthrough DWDM lasers
Analogue chip foundry Tower Semiconductor and Scintil Photonics, a Grenoble-based maker of integrated photonics, have announced the availability of the first heterogeneously integrated Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) laser sources for AI infrastructure using Scintil's SHIP (Scintil Heterogeneous Integrated Photonics) technology.
DWDM lasers are an essential component of Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) based next generation of AI infrastructure that aims to deliver ever-growing bandwidth density, ultra-low tail latency, and lower energy per bit.
Scintil's SHIP technology has been validated on Tower's silicon photonics platform. LEAF Light is the industry's first DWDM-optimised, intelligent external laser source fabricated with SHIP.
"Next-generation AI infrastructure demands optical interconnects that deliver more bandwidth per fibre at lower power per bit," said Matt Crowley, CEO of Scintil Photonics. "DWDM co-packaged optics meets that bar. LEAF Light brings the DWDM laser source technology; Tower's SiPho platform brings the manufacturing scale. With SHIP now validated on Tower's production lines, customers have a path from evaluation to millions of units per month."
"We deeply value our long-term partnership with Scintil, and are excited to bring this revolutionary monolithic DWDM laser technology to market to enable next generations of scale-up architectures," said Ed Preisler, VP and GM of RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor. "Scintil's platform complements our PH18M platform already in mass production for optical transceivers at our facilities worldwide."
As AI data centre growth accelerates, hyperscalers need networking solutions that reduce power, improve utilisation, and scale with the next generation of models. DWDM CPO, with higher bandwidth density, lower energy per bit, and ultra-low tail latency, are where the industry is heading. LEAF Light is claimed to be the first production-ready DWDM laser source that uses heterogeneous integration to monolithically integrate active lasers and established silicon photonics on a single chip.
