Eindhoven breaks ground on 6-inch InP pilot line

On 9 March, construction begins in Eindhoven on an indium phosphide (InP) integrated-photonics pilot line. The facility will focus on 6-inch InP wafer processing, whereas 4 inch is currently state-of-the-art in commercial production. “The line will serve both as an open-access facility for product development and as a proving ground for 6-inch production. Both aspects are necessary for the technology to continue scaling,” says Ton van Mol, managing director TNO at Holst Centre, which will host and run the facility.

And scale the technology must, as a recent announcement by Nvidia illustrates. The king of AI chips is funneling 4 billion dollars into Coherent and Lumentum, two US-based suppliers of components for optical communication in data centers. As AI workloads drive exponential growth in data center bandwidth and power consumption, these optical interconnects are increasingly required to move data faster and more efficiently between processors, switches and memory.