Lightmatter has announced a strategic collaboration with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE), the world’s largest semiconductor packaging and testing provider, to advance the Passage™ platform. Passage is the world’s first 3D-stacked photonics engine with pluggable fiber, designed to address interconnect bottlenecks in AI data centers. This partnership leverages ASE’s advanced 3D integration and large-scale packaging capabilities to deliver a scalable solution capable of connecting millions of XPUs with high bandwidth and low latency. The innovation aims to meet the demands of next-generation AI models and will facilitate scaling of AI workloads at the speed of light.
The Passage platform offers optical connectivity from tens to hundreds of Tbps in a single multi-die package and can interconnect over a thousand XPUs in a single domain. Its 3D-stacked photonics engine eliminates the bottlenecks associated with traditional 2D optical chiplet designs, which are constrained by chip shoreline limitations. Instead, Passage enables I/O across the entire chip surface, freeing up the shoreline for memory and other functionalities. This partnership with ASE also introduces pluggable fiber attachment points to allow scalable, high-density, and serviceable all-optical interconnects, marking a critical advancement for large-scale AI data center infrastructure.
By combining Lightmatter’s photonic expertise with ASE’s established leadership in semiconductor packaging, the collaboration provides a path to deploy highly efficient and scalable GenAI superclusters. “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 at Lightmatter.
Key Points:
• Lightmatter and ASE partner to bring the Passage™ platform, a 3D photonic engine with pluggable fiber, to AI data centers.
• Passage offers tens to hundreds of Tbps of optical connectivity in a single package and interconnects over a thousand XPUs.
• 3D photonics eliminates chip shoreline constraints by enabling I/O across the entire chip surface.
• Partnership includes pluggable fiber attachment points for scalable and serviceable optical interconnects.
• Collaboration enables efficient and scalable GenAI superclusters for next-generation workloads.
“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.”
