Silicon photonics leader Lightmatter unveiled microring-based 800G/1.6T interconnect technology at OFC 2026. It tackles thermal compensation in AI compute environments and, through 3D-stacked packaging and integration with the TSMC/ASE ecosystem, marks a new milestone for silicon photonics commercialization.

Amkor posted record revenue, driven by AI computing and advanced packaging rather than traditional smartphones. CPO joined its technology platform for the first time, and long-term deals with TSMC and NVIDIA tie it to the core of the AI supply chain.

TSMC publicly placed CPO's bottlenecks in seven links outside its own walls, and the valuation narrative is shifting from "who can make photonic chips" to "who is holding up coupling and test." The same week Broadcom pointed to $230 billion within three years and cloud customers passed 53% of Ciena's revenue, but the hardest evidence was HIWIN's 6-month lead time and Chieftek's 30x order surge.

TSMC's 3DIC talk at OCP carried one real message: component-level qualification is dead. With customer chips entering the fab before TSMC's own test vehicles, packaging has become the gatekeeper of AI compute, and TSMC wants the whole supply chain inside STCO. Its line that 'signaling belongs to photons' is a direct endorsement of CPO and silicon photonics.

AI's performance bottleneck is no longer compute but data movement across chips and packages. At VLSI 2026, TSMC answered with its 3DFabric platform: make the package itself the vehicle for AI scaling. We walk through all 19 figures, from 48x compute and 34x HBM bandwidth to power-thermal co-optimization and agentic EDA.

The first bottleneck in silicon photonics isn’t silicon’s inability to emit light — it’s whether designers can get a box of foundry-guaranteed building blocks that will actually yield. That box is the PDK. Why is it so much harder than an electronic PDK, and why is it the foundry’s quietest moat?

A walk through a silicon photonics optical module from Tx to Rx: every core component, the key interfaces between them, and how Intel, NVIDIA, Broadcom, TSMC and DustPhotonics make different design choices on the road from pluggables to LPO and CPO.