NTT targets optical chiplet production
A Japanese consortium aims to scale optical chiplet manufacturing for advanced packaging and AI computing.
A consortium led by NTT Innovative Devices has been selected for a Japanese government-backed research and development project to establish mass-production technologies for optical chiplets, advancing photonics-electronics convergence (PEC) for next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
The project is supported by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) under its programme for developing manufacturing technologies for advanced semiconductors.
Japan Semiconductor Corporation, Furukawa Electric and Shinko Electric Industries will participate in the development work, with NTT serving as an advisor.
The initiative aims to address growing demand for high-bandwidth, energy-efficient data transmission in AI data centres and HPC systems.
As generative AI workloads expand, communication between semiconductor chips and packages is becoming an increasingly important factor in overall system performance and power consumption.
Optical chiplets use light to transmit data between semiconductor chips and packages, offering a potential route to higher communication bandwidth and lower power consumption than conventional electrical interconnects in suitable applications.
Integrating photonics with electronic devices, however, introduces manufacturing challenges spanning optical device fabrication, testing, interconnects and advanced packaging.
The consortium aims to develop manufacturing technologies that deliver more than a tenfold increase in productivity compared with current research-and-development-stage processes. It will also establish and evaluate a pilot production line designed to support future commercial manufacturing.
Each participant will contribute expertise across the optical chiplet manufacturing value chain. NTT Innovative Devices will develop manufacturing, testing and packaging technologies for mass production.
Japan Semiconductor will focus on silicon photonics manufacturing technologies optimised for heterogeneous material integration, while Furukawa Electric will develop manufacturing processes for compound semiconductor-based optical devices.
Shinko Electric Industries will focus on optical chiplet packaging technologies and mass-production processes, including in-process inspection. NTT will advise on the project, promoting industry collaboration and supply chain development to support commercialisation.
The work builds on NTT’s ongoing research into optical chiplet packaging under NEDO’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing programme, which began in fiscal year 2023.
The new initiative shifts the emphasis towards establishing scalable production processes across the manufacturing chain, from photonic device fabrication and testing to optical interconnects and packaging.
For the advanced packaging industry, the project highlights the growing importance of integrating optical and electronic components within next-generation semiconductor systems.
Scaling these technologies will require not only advances in photonics but also repeatable packaging processes, inspection capabilities and manufacturing infrastructure suitable for higher-volume production.
The consortium expects the work to strengthen Japan’s domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and help establish a competitive supply chain for photonics-electronics convergence devices.
The longer-term objective is to support the high-capacity, low-power interconnects needed by next-generation AI computing infrastructure while helping address the rising energy demands of data centres.
