Photonics computing company Lightmatter has announced it's extending its manufacturing partnerships with GlobalFoundries, ASE, and Amkor. Lightmatter’s VP of product, Steve Klinger, said the announcements reinforce the fact that Lightmatter is moving into the next phase of its product development.
Describing ASE as one of the “premier packaging suppliers in the industry,” Klinger said the company is one of Lightmatter’s key OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) partners. Meanwhile, Lightmatter is also working with Amkor on the packaging front for very large-scale package complexes for its Passage optical interconnect.
Lightmatter’s concept is to take compute units or networking chips and build them directly onto silicon photonics. This allows the company to take a die from a customer who is already developing a high bandwidth networking chip and integrate it directly with Lightmatter’s Passage interconnect.
“The benefit of doing that is we can do the electrical optical conversion immediately, right underneath the signal bump on the die, so it's very efficient. But, the more important thing is, because it's a 3D integration, you can locate the high-speed signals on the customer die anywhere in the area of the chip.”
