Tower Semiconductor noted for silicon photonics

Silicon photonics puts data onto light instead of electrical wires, and Tower Semiconductor has become one of the few Western foundries publicly offering that manufacturing at scale. (towersemi.com) Tower says its silicon photonics platform serves optical communications, data-center interconnects, high-performance computing and sensors, with support for both 1,310-nanometer O-band and 1,550-nanometer C-band designs. The company lists low-loss waveguides, germanium photodiodes, modulators and multi-project wafer runs as standard parts of the offering. (towersemi.com) The manufacturing footprint has expanded in the past 18 months. On November 26, 2024, Tower said it released a 300-millimeter silicon photonics process as a standard foundry offering, adding to its older 200-millimeter PH18 platform that was already in high-volume production. (towersemi.com) That was followed on November 19, 2024 by Tower’s announcement that it had started volume production of 1.6-terabit-per-second silicon photonic products for multiple lead customers on its latest platform. On March 10, 2025, Tower and Innolight said they were ramping next-generation silicon photonics solutions for artificial-intelligence and data-center optics. (towersemi.com, towersemi.com) Co-packaged optics is the next step those posts are pointing to: it moves optical links next to the switch chip so data can leave the package as light rather than travel farther as power-hungry electrical signals. On November 12, 2025, Tower said it had adapted its 300-millimeter wafer-bonding technology to stack silicon photonics with silicon-germanium BiCMOS processes for co-packaged optics. (towersemi.com) Tower has also been building around the laser problem. Silicon is good at guiding and modulating light, but it is not naturally good at generating it, so many photonic chips still need a separate laser source or a bonded-on laser. (towersemi.com, towersemi.com) On March 2, 2023, Tower said its PH18DB platform added gallium-arsenide quantum-dot lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers onto its PH18 silicon photonics base process. The company described that platform as combining lasers, amplifiers, waveguides, photodetectors and modulators on one silicon chip. (towersemi.com) Other companies in Tower’s orbit have been lining up the upstream supply chain for those lasers. On January 23, 2025, Quintessent and IQE said they had established a large-scale quantum-dot epitaxial wafer supply chain for artificial-intelligence optical interconnects; Quintessent describes itself as a developer of quantum-dot laser technology and heterogeneous silicon photonics. (businesswire.com) Tower’s more recent announcements show the same push toward faster optics. On March 23, 2026, Tower and Coherent said they demonstrated 400-gigabits-per-second-per-lane data transmission in a production-ready silicon photonics process, targeting 3.2-terabit optical transceivers for pluggable modules and co-packaged optics. (towersemi.com) That leaves Tower in a specific lane: not the only photonics manufacturer, but one of the few Western pure-play foundries publicly advertising standard silicon photonics, laser-integration options and co-packaged-optics process technology on named platforms. The social-media attention is new; the manufacturing build-out has been visible in Tower’s releases since 2023. (towersemi.com, towersemi.com, towersemi.com)