Hyperlight, Umc and Wavetek Announce Strategic Partnership for High-Volume Foundry Production of Tfln Chiplet Platform

HyperLight Corporation, United Microelectronics Corporation, and Wavetek Microelectronics Corporation announced a strategic manufacturing partnership for high-volume foundry production of HyperLight?s TFLN (thin-film lithium niobate) Chiplet Platform on both 6-inch and 8-inch wafers. The collaboration marks a major inflection point in the commercialization of TFLN photonics, enabling the manufacturing capacity required for AI and cloud infrastructure deployment at scale. Designed from inception to enable AI-infrastructure-scale production, the TFLN Chiplet Platform unifies the requirements of short-reach IMDD-based data center pluggables, longer-reach coherent-based datacom and telecom modules, and co-packaged optics (CPO) within a single high-volume manufacturable architecture.

HyperLight serves as the platform architect, while UMC and Wavetek provide the high-volume foundry manufacturing infrastructure required for global deployment. Building on HyperLight?s long-standing collaboration with Wavetek, which brought TFLN photonics from laboratory innovation to a customer-qualified, high-volume manufacturing (HVM) line within a 6-inch CMOS foundry, UMC is bringing to the partnership its 8-inch production capability and expertise to support the scale required for AI infrastructure growth. The TFLN Chiplet Platform enables fundamental performance gains including extreme high modulation bandwidth, CMOS-level drive voltage and ultralow optical loss.

For AI networks across all interconnect distances, TFLN reduces laser consumption and supports CMOS direct-drive voltage, lowering power consumption as lane speeds continue to scale. For emerging applications like quantum computing and sensing, the TFLN Chiplet platform enables the extreme performance required at scale. HyperLight?s platform approach consolidates diverse customer requirements into a standardized, production-ready architecture, reducing ecosystem complexity, lowering manufacturing risk, and enabling rapid, cost-competitive adoption of TFLN photonics at global scale.