Overview
- UMC, which announced Tuesday, began mass production of 12-inch silicon photonics wafers at its Fab 12i in Singapore to support SILITH Technology’s 1.6T photonics platform.
- The production push follows an 18-month collaboration with SILITH that moved the platform from development to production readiness and achieved production-level yield and reliability.
- UMC licensed imec’s iSiPP300 process in December 2025 and says it targets risk production using that process across 2026–2027 while offering its own 12-inch development platform by 2027.
- The company reported stronger recent sales with June revenue up about 22.9% year-on-year and Citi analysts raised their outlook for Q2 2026 sales and margins even though UMC’s stock briefly fell on the announcement day.
- The move deepens Singapore’s role as a regional semiconductor hub, could cut per-unit costs for AI data-center optical interconnects through larger wafers, and sets up competition with larger foundries that have also signaled interest in photonics.