Lightmatter has teamed up with Amkor Technology to develop the world’s largest 3D photonics chip package using the innovative Passage platform.
Lightmatter, a player in photonic supercomputing, announced a strategic partnership with Amkor Technology, Inc., a prominent provider of semiconductor packaging and test services. The partnership aims to create the largest-ever 3D-packaged chip complex, utilizing Lightmatter’s innovative Passage platform. This collaboration combines Lightmatter’s pioneering 3D-stacked photonic engine with Amkor’s expertise in advanced multi-die packaging to address the escalating interconnect scaling and power demands of contemporary AI workloads.
With the diminishing returns of Moore’s Law, the challenge of scaling AI performance at the chip level increasingly hinges on integrating more silicon within a single package. Traditional methods often involve layering multiple processor, memory, and I/O chiplets onto an electrical silicon interposer, which, while enhancing compute capabilities, limits I/O bandwidth due to restricted space and the need for increased memory integration.
Addressing these limitations, Lightmatter’s Passage platform employs 3D integration of customer dies directly onto a silicon photonic interconnect, significantly enhancing connection density and bandwidth both within and outside the package. The platform’s integration of Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) within the interconnect further enhances the resiliency and flexibility of the interconnect topology. This partnership with Amkor is poised to deliver the industry’s largest multi-reticle die complex on an organic substrate within a 3D package, bringing unparalleled benefits to customers.
Ritesh Jain, SVP of Engineering and Operations at Lightmatter, expressed enthusiasm about the partnership with Amkor, emphasizing its potential to revolutionise advanced packaging and silicon performance. He highlighted collaboration as a crucial step in establishing a leading-edge ecosystem that propels AI and HPC computing offerings to new heights of bandwidth and efficiency.
As AI processors expand in size, their power consumption also increases, doubling approximately every two years. The Passage platform, an all-photonic silicon interconnect layer, integrates seamlessly into 3D packages to counteract this trend, offering superior energy efficiency and performance, especially under demanding thermal conditions. This breakthrough by Lightmatter and Amkor promises significant advances in silicon density and bandwidth within a single package, paving the way for major computing advancements, including AGI.
Kevin Engel, EVP of Business Units at Amkor, echoed the sentiment, celebrating the collaboration with Lightmatter on integrating their state-of-the-art Passage platform. He underlined Amkor’s commitment to leveraging its deep semiconductor integration expertise to develop and validate a robust 3D packaging solution, aiming to bring this innovative silicon photonics technology to mainstream market availability.
