Tower Semiconductor and Marvell hit five million coherent PIC shipments
Tower Semiconductor and Marvell Technology have jointly announced a production milestone: more than five million coherent photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have been shipped to Marvell's global customers. The announcement marks a significant commercial validation for Tower's silicon photonics (SiPho) platform, which serves as the foundry backbone for Marvell's coherent optical transceiver products targeting AI-driven data centre interconnect (DCI) networks.
Coherent PICs are considerably more demanding to manufacture than direct-detect optical components. They must precisely control the phase and polarisation of light rather than amplitude alone, placing tighter constraints on both process tolerances and packaging. Tower has developed capabilities across several enabling technologies for the programme, including the integration of non-silicon materials into the photonic stack, three-dimensional integration of electronics, and advanced optical packaging techniques such as V-Groove alignment structures.
The milestone
Dr Ed Preisler, vice president and general manager of the RF Business Unit at Tower Semiconductor, said the partnership is positioned to keep pace with evolving coherent transceiver requirements. Dr Radha Nagarajan, senior vice president and chief technology officer for optical engineering at Marvell, described Tower as a key ecosystem partner and said the collaboration will push next-generation coherent technologies for what Marvell terms "scale-across" data centre architectures.
Neither company disclosed revenue associated with the five-million-unit figure, per-unit pricing, or the specific end customers taking the transceiver modules. Tower operates fabrication facilities across Israel, the United States, Japan and Italy, giving it multi-geography capacity for a programme of this scale.
Market context
Silicon photonics for data centre interconnect has become a strategic priority as hyperscalers and co-location operators upgrade their internal fabrics to handle the bandwidth requirements of large-scale AI training and inference clusters. Optical transceiver consumption at 400G, 800G and emerging 1.6T speeds is accelerating, with coherent technology moving down from long-haul and metro networks into shorter-reach intra-data-centre links.
The foundry market for silicon photonics is relatively concentrated. A small number of established analogue foundries, including Tower, compete alongside the captive photonics lines maintained by larger IDMs and the in-house SiPho programmes run by some hyperscalers directly. Imec and GlobalFoundries are also active in this space. Five million cumulative units represents meaningful production scale and gives Tower a reference-volume argument when competing for new design wins.
Regulatory and standards read-across
Power consumption is an intensifying regulatory and commercial consideration for data centre operators. The EU's Energy Efficiency Directive and domestic planning rules in several UK and European jurisdictions increasingly require operators to demonstrate energy-efficiency improvements. Coherent optical links offer a per-bit energy advantage over electrical interconnect at distances beyond a few hundred metres, which is a selling point that aligns with both commercial efficiency targets and emerging regulatory expectations around data centre power use.
Tower Semiconductor is dual-listed on NASDAQ and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. The release carries standard forward-looking-statement disclaimers referencing its SEC filings. Investors will be watching for further volume disclosures and any announcement of next-generation process nodes within the Tower-Marvell programme as coherent specifications continue to advance.