SILITH and UMC Achieve Mass Production Milestone for Silicon Photonics

SILITH and UMC have achieved first mass-production delivery of silicon photonics wafers from UMC's Singapore fab, moving a 1.6T platform from development to high-volume manufacturing in 18 months. The platform has been qualified by a leading cloud customer and UMC is opening its 12-inch silicon photonics manufacturing capability to other customers in 2027. UMC's 12-inch silicon photonics fab is now open for customer products in 2027—if you're building optical interconnects or data centre networking gear, your manufacturing dependency just got a second source and your cost curve got steeper. SILITH proved the platform can hit 200G/lane at scale; the next player to tape-out will be racing someone else's roadmap.