MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., November 14, 2024 -- Lightmatter, the leader in photonic supercomputing, today announced a strategic collaboration with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE, a member of ASE Technology Holding Inc.), the world’s largest semiconductor packaging and testing services provider. The partnership will focus on advancing Lightmatter’s Passage platform, the world’s first 3D-stacked photonics engine with pluggable fiber, to overcome the critical AI interconnect bottlenecks hindering today’s data center infrastructure. This breakthrough enables scaling to millions of XPUs at the speed of light to meet the unprecedented demands of AI workloads.

Scaling compute infrastructure to address the next generation of frontier AI models requires very large numbers of XPUs to be closely connected with extremely high bandwidth and low latency. Passage can directly connect over a thousand XPUs in one domain and deliver from tens to hundreds of Terabits per second (Tbps) of optical connectivity in a single multi-die package. Together, these advances represent an orders-of-magnitude increase over current solutions that utilize pluggable optics.

“ASE’s unmatched expertise in semiconductor packaging and their wide deployment across the industry makes them the perfect partner for us as we expand our Passage platform,” said Ritesh Jain, SVP of Engineering and Operations of Lightmatter. “This collaboration allows us to push the boundaries of silicon photonics packaging, addressing the most pressing needs of high-performance computing and datacenter applications.”

“We are thrilled to work with Lightmatter to advance their Passage technology,” said CP Hung, Corporate VP R&D, ASE, Inc. “Our collaboration is a terrific example of how ASE’s 3D integration capabilities and large-scale packaging can help bring innovative solutions to market faster, supporting the demand for continued performance scaling in AI silicon.”

Unlike 2D optical chiplet solutions that are limited by the chip shoreline, Lightmatter’s 3D-stacked photonics engine enables I/O to be placed over the entire chip surface area, dramatically increasing the bandwidth and freeing chip shoreline for other needs including memory expansion. By partnering with ASE, Lightmatter will deliver a photonics-optimized 3D packaging solution that empowers its customers to massively expand high-speed connectivity to their chips and rapidly scale the production and deployment of the most advanced GenAI superclusters.

The joint effort between Lightmatter and ASE also addresses the need to directly incorporate pluggable fiber attachment points for all-optical interconnect scaling at very high fiber density in a reliable and serviceable manner. This innovation represents a significant step forward for the industry in delivering enhanced performance and efficiency for large-scale AI datacenters.