News briefing Nikkei reports that TSMC, the world’s largest wafer foundry, is betting heavily on silicon photonic technology to help stimulate growth and assist AI applications such as ChatGPT and the like to become more powerful. In fact, silicon photonics has already been hotly discussed in the industry at the recently concluded "SEMICON Taiwan 2023 – the International Semiconductor Equipment Exhibition", where semiconductor giants such as TSMC, ASE, and others delivered keynote discussions on related topics. Impact analysis Currently, optoelectronic module designs usually have laid out optical components on the PCB, while silicon photonic technology integrates components onto the same carrier board to form a co-packaged optical module (abbreviated as CPO), which shortens the photoelectric transmission path as well as reducing signal loss and heat energy generation. As the demand for high-frequency, high-speed transmission in data centers increases, and the rapid development of HPC, AI and other technological applications continues, silicon photonics technology is beginning to receive greater attention. As indicated from the figures by research agency MarketsandMarkets, the current silicon photonics market is worth approximately US$1.42 billion. Photonics technology is primarily used in data centers and HPC – this accounts for approximately 54.8% of the overall market share – while other applications include communications, military aerospace, biotechnology, and medical care. As such, the market for silicon photonics market is expected to grow from US$1.42 billion in 2023 to US$4.95 billion in 2028, a compound annual growth rate of 28.4% over the period. Glass substrate packing solutions, another emerging technology proposed by Intel, have also attracted as much attention as silicon photonics. Due to the material's physical properties, existing substrate materials must deal with limitations such as energy consumption, expansion, and warping when hundreds of millions of transistor packages are to be processed. On the other hand, glass substrate has an excellent thermal expansion coefficient, smoother surface, and more stable production with fine lines, it is, therefore, considered to be one of the potential solutions to help break loose from Moore's Law. When silicon photonics technology is combined with glass substrate packaging, electrical signals in the chip can be converted into optical signals and transmitted through optical waveguides, so that they can further increase the speed of photoelectric transmission. Although glass substrates still have limitations such as high cost, fragile materials, and the need for new production process planning, glass substrates will, in meeting the needs of advanced packaging, have the opportunity to replace existing carrier board materials. Furthermore, some carrier board manufacturers have already established relevant technologies, and they should use this advantage to capture a decisive market share of new carrier boards in the future.