Tower Semiconductor and Semtech Corporation have announced an expanded multi-year agreement to enhance their long-standing partnership, which spans two decades.
The agreement involves Semtech investing in dedicated silicon germanium capacity at Tower to support its growing demand for AI Data Center optical interconnect components.
As AI clusters expand, the energy cost of data movement is becoming a critical factor in the efficiency of accelerators, with increasing requirements for bandwidth and power efficiency.
Semtech's signal integrity portfolio, which includes transimpedance amplifiers, modulator and laser drivers, and linear equalizers, is based on Tower's SiGe process technology and is designed to meet the needs of next-generation data center architectures.
The partnership's success is highlighted by Semtech's recent award at the European Conference on Optical Communication for its 224 Gbps per Lane TIA Family for Linear Pluggable Optics, built on Tower's advanced SiGe technology.
Tower and Semtech are also collaborating on a joint technology roadmap to maintain product leadership in AI data center interconnects.
Hong Hou, Semtech President and Chief Executive Officer, stated, “Connectivity is now a primary factor in how far AI systems can scale. Our customers are scaling interconnect bandwidth quickly and at massive scale. Meeting that demand requires long-term capacity planning and commitment with our manufacturing partners."