TSMC's COUPE Platform and Veeco's LUMINA+ System Accelerate AI Data Center Optical Interconnects

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plans to bring its COUPE (Compact Universal Photonic Engine) co‑packaged optics (CPO) platform into mass production by 2026, positioning CPO as a key interconnect solution for AI data centers. The technology integrates photonic and electronic circuits on a single chip, but testing remains a bottleneck: no unified standards exist, and precise optical probe alignment still relies on manual processes that can take over 100 seconds per photonic integrated circuit.

Veeco Instruments announced that a global leader in optical and photonic technologies has ordered its LUMINA®+ metal‑organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) system to fabricate indium phosphide (InP) lasers for datacom optical transceivers. The LUMINA+ system offers the largest batch size in the As/P MOCVD market, high throughput and low cost per wafer, enabling rapid scaling of InP laser production. With optical transceiver sales projected to reach $39 billion in 2026, these advances are critical for meeting the power‑efficiency and latency demands of AI‑driven workloads.