Tower Semiconductor and Innolight announced on November 3, 2026, a continued collaboration on emerging Near-Package Optics (NPO) applications aimed at next-generation AI infrastructure.

Innolight Advances NPO Production With Tower Silicon Photonics

Innolight has achieved a key milestone in the development of its NPO portfolio, with its first NPO device entering early production using Tower's PH18M Silicon Photonics process flow running in Tower's US California factory.

In parallel, Innolight has taped out multiple NPO products on Tower's 300 mm Silicon Photonics platform to support future product generations.

The collaboration combines Innolight's expertise in optical interconnect solutions with Tower's high-volume 200 mm and 300 mm Silicon Photonics manufacturing platforms to address the increasing performance and bandwidth requirements of next-generation AI infrastructure.

NPO as an Emerging Interconnect Approach

According to the announcement, as AI workloads continue to scale, NPO architectures are emerging as one of the preferred approaches for next-generation optical interconnects.

These emerging architectures are expected to drive additional demand beyond today's pluggable optical module market, driving a new phase of optical interconnect solutions for AI and cloud infrastructure.

"Near-Package Optics is emerging as a key technology for next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure," said Oliver Sun, CTO of Innolight. "Our collaboration with Tower provides us with industry-leading capabilities, enabling us to accelerate the development of NPO solutions to meet the evolving needs of hyperscale and AI data center customers."

Higher Channel Counts Raise Manufacturing Demands

NPO architectures typically require substantially higher optical channel counts than conventional pluggable optical modules, often integrating 16 or more channels on a single device. As channel counts increase, manufacturing expertise, process control, and yield performance become increasingly critical, according to the companies.

Tower says its leadership in high-volume Silicon Photonics manufacturing, together with its advanced 200 mm and 300 mm SiPho platforms, provides the process uniformity, high-yield performance, and rich device offerings needed to support these increasingly complex designs.

The platform also enables monolithic integration of multiple photonic functions, including wavelength division multiplexing and demultiplexing on a single chip, enabling increased functionality with compact size while optimizing performance and scalability.

A Partnership Spanning Four Facilities

"Given their market and product leadership, Innolight continues to be a critical technology partner for Tower's silicon photonics roadmap as well as a cornerstone manufacturing customer now across four of our facilities, two in the US (Newport Beach, California, and San Antonio, Texas) and one each in Israel and Japan," said Dr. Marco Racanelli, President, Tower Semiconductor.

"By combining Innolight's innovation in optical connectivity with Tower's differentiated Silicon Photonics technologies and manufacturing expertise, we continue to advance solutions that address the demands of future optical networks."

About the Companies

Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ/TASE: TSEM) describes itself as a leading foundry of high-value analog semiconductor solutions, serving markets including industrial, automotive, mobile, infrastructure, medical, and aerospace & defense.

Its portfolio includes silicon photonics, SiGe, RF CMOS, CMOS image sensors, power management, and mixed-signal technologies, supported by design enablement and process transfer services. Tower operates a global manufacturing network with 200 mm and 300 mm fabs in Israel, the U.S., Japan, and Italy.

Innolight is a provider of optical connectivity solutions for data center and AI infrastructure applications and describes itself as a world leader in high-speed optical solutions for optical communication networking, especially for AI and data center applications, with global footprints in California, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Suzhou, China.

The announcement was issued from Migdal Haemek, Israel, and Suzhou, China.

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