Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs is assembling an alliance of roughly 30 companies, TSMC included, to keep the island on top as chip-to-chip links move to light. Announced on Sept 6, the group’s first priority is co-packaged optics, or CPO, which pulls optical engines into the package so data travels a fraction of the distance it does over today’s copper lines.
Light-based signaling generates almost no heat, and the ministry says silicon photonics can cut power draw by 30 to 50 percent while lifting data rates sharply. It lists the technology as a pillar of the government’s New 10 Major AI Infrastructure Projects and points to Nvidia’s $4B investment in silicon photonics last March as proof the market is moving.
Taiwan argues it starts from a strong base. It hosts more than 90 percent of leading-edge logic capacity at 7nm and below and over half of the world’s outsourced semiconductor assembly and test business, giving CPO pioneers a ready-made ecosystem of foundries, packagers and materials suppliers. Silicon photonics dominated discussion at SEMICON Taiwan, which wrapped up on Sept 4.
The ministry has not published the full member list, and the alliance’s charter, road map and funding are still being drawn up. The effort mirrors a wider race in which the US, Japan and Europe are all funding photonics programs, as optical I/O moves from research curiosity to a mainstream answer to AI’s bandwidth bottleneck.
