Lightmatter Follows Up October Funding with Amkor, ASE Collaborations

Photonic supercomputing company Lightmatter has established strategic partnerships with semiconductor packaging and testing companies Amkor Technology and Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE). The collaborations aim to advance Lightmatter’s Passage platform and follow the company's $400 million funding round, announced last month.

The partnership with Amkor involves Lightmatter’s 3D-stacked photonic engine along with Amkor’s advanced multi-die packaging expertise to create a 3D-packaged chip complex to meet the interconnect scaling and power demands of modern AI workloads. The collaboration targets unprecedented silicon density and bandwidth within a single package, paving the way for next-generation computing advances like artificial general intelligence, Lightmatter said.

Lightmatter’s 3D-stacked photonics engine enables input/output 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 generative AI superclusters, the company said.

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.